Hosting panels at VentureFest South 2025 last week, I saw lots of people leave the day re-energised with a sense of possibilities, at odds with bland commercial landscapes, stymied climate summits and horrifying political FAFOs. But I travelled home that day with an even crazier idea – what if we began to expect defence contractors to have the highest holistic standards of sustainability? What if that’s the way we’ll do resilient business in the future?

Hold on to your rage. Or your incredulity. Zip it aside into a hazmat box for a moment.

Bullet-time the boiling points and tipping points and talking points, if you can, and walk with me.

Let’s start at the RSA. I was there a few nights ago. A long way from a military front line, and still a bit removed from everyday business ones, even if the society is more than a bit establishment. Sitting in the Prince Phillip Room, we were being invited to consider a principle that almost seems fundamental to the work of the RSA today – the Overview Effect.

You know it, right? When I met Astronaut Bob Springer, a life long engineer around riding rockets, he spoke practically about operations on the shuttle Discovery and of his wider career. When I asked him what his lasting impression was of going into space, however, he flickered for a beat and tonally switched gears:

“Everyone comes back from space an environmentalist. Everyone” he said, with a look that was as far-away as it was steely.

His testimony to me went into my very first essay about futures stuff, in the brand book I made for my LP, The Shape of Things To Hum. I didn’t know it then, but that was my first Unsee The Future piece, all but ten years ago.

That night we were introduced to the bloke who coined the phrase the overview effect and turned it into a book and a whole thing – Frank White. And we were introduced by someone who so embodies the principles I’ve since been led to explore as a space loving, future-facing artist it feels timey-wimey, Samantha Tauber.

Sam and her work is worth a piece all on her own – and you can find it on the front cover article of RSA Magazine issue 4 2024. But it will also undoubtedly turn into a recorded conversation between us at some point for, partly through her creative alter ego VINCII, she is exploring the intersection of music and futurism. Which in turn brought her an invitation to join the Interstellar Foundation, in which she met Frank White and many others.

She invited me to join her in her first workshop in London, Celestial bottle: A message across space and time, and during it she interviewed Frank live across Zoom for us and introduced us to the Interstellar community’s conviction that it will take imagination and artistic skills to really get stuck into different futures, woven together with science and technological research – and Samantha had a guest in the room who was also a member – Haz Dulull.

Haz was splendidly friendly and relaxed. All as he explained his accidental successes breaking game building platforms and making scifi features for Netflix. Trying stuff by following the personal trail of having fun with things he enjoyed, Haz learned big lessons, didn’t play by systemic rules and took risks based on personal instincts, building a perfectly enviable creative testimony in the process.

This, I thought as an aside, is very entrepreneurial energy. Casually great personal story and success energy. Very VentureFest energy.

Nothing Ventured.

I’ve volunteered at VentureFest South for, blimey, most of its nine years, I think. Have I? Feels like it, but Ed Gould keeps inviting me back. And every year I come away convinced there is always some creative energy out there in the business system. People are amazing. They have ideas and they find ways to overcome all their own deficiencies and practical barriers and scoffing incredulities around them to take those ideas as close to realised and released into the world as the last vestiges of their nervous energies will allow. And usually some way beyond those.

It’s not a place that desperately needs a Timo Peach. Even though it’s an event about ideas and creating things out of nothing but vision and commitment and, by various implications, futures, the investors and pitchers are really just looking for each other. They’ve already found the nerve to tackle a problem, change something for the better, deploy vision into winning storytelling and worked out how to deliver it. And they’re already at an event that could be a turning point. I can’t be a creative catalyst for much there. But for me, it’s partly a brilliant research experience.

This year I found myself hosting four panels back to back. I really should hire a team to help me be across small print and temper my enthusiasm. But to talk to people of all ages in all manner of sectors about their specialist ideas and how they’re scaling a crazy concept, reaching people, finding funding… I marvel. And thinking about them all in one day, putting some of them side by side in live discussion is very Unsee The Future, right?

How do these things juxtapose, and what themes cross over about how to make a difference right now?

My last panel of the day was to do with space and defence. Though it sounds more like a topic so big you’d find it listed at the G20 summit that also happened this week, the folks joining me were not members of an elite level boys club. Not least because five of my six guests were women. Still, when talking about the defence sector, a conscionable artist isn’t always going to want to be Instagrammed in front of certain logos. And, yes, a couple of the companies represented are connected to contracts somewhere in their work with products that lead the wrong way to Israel – a symbolic flashpoint for my personal view of what’s wrong with the way the global systems we’re defending value everything. Plus, it’s the nature of the defence sector’s business to be specialistly complicated to the component level – it can’t be all football in front of the Foxhounds, I guess. One of my panelist’s websites so immediately presents images of riot police bashing in front doors and crowd control vehicles I kind of laughed with the relevant guest and our audience about it.

So I stood in the middle of everyone and turned up my soul radar as best I could. Tried not to be a bell-end. How could I hold issues in tension, dehumanise no one, keep it relevant to the context yet honest and reportable to my own mission?

I listened. I tried to contextualise. I made a few jokes. “We’ve had protesters” – “I might have been one of them”.

And then a thought emerged from the discussion. Just the beginning of one, but a wonk of a challenge to the world we’re in, as we each dare to take part.

What would a B-Corp defence contractor look like?

Will the future defence sector be full of them?

Now. I’d ask you to take a beat and not short circuit that question with reflexive righteous anger or even lazy cynicism. Duh to all that, yes. But I do mean, what if a manufacturer or data wrangler aiming to support deployed operations or to counter hostile activities really did sign up to B-Corp’s rigorously holistic and accountable standards of wellbeing?

How… I mean, what… I mean… huh. Is it even a conceivable idea?

Which Doctor Who story is it that sees the Anglican church turning into a military institution? Four-star Bishops and the like. Yeah, the Royal Artillery B-Corps sounds positively Orwellian.

But sit with it a moment, it’s a chewy one for your conshy noggin.

It’s not simply that everyone’s testimony on my six person panel included emotive human reasons for giving their lives over to working in the jobs they’d chosen. Or that it takes, perhaps, a certain kind of person to do so, to handle the mental balance it requires. It’s more the wondering whether a much more morally clear government could help people stepping up to face the difficult stuff, even more consciously put together many different perspectives on resilience at once. Even including wellbeing.

The word resilience is euphemistic in defence circles these days. It has a very different meaning to the one in my head, especially after spending a couple of months getting to know a nature-focussed landscape partnership like that in the Brecks. But in any human sphere, being able to cope with stuff still comes back to having built dependable relationships and practiced confidence.

Could a contractor have red lines about not just clients but suppliers? Could that work? Not very far in isolation, I should think – but in a whole sector movement of partnership? If enough people demanded the right legally binding conditions on contracts and subsequent operations?

Is this another unthinkable idea that sounds slightly more conceivable with each passing, horrifying day of the current American administration?

Because the real problem isn’t exactly weapons manufacturing. It’s the economics that makes it so lucrative and such a priority, and the effect it has on us practicing such market demands and “opportunities” for very long. When nothing matters but profit to a company’s owners, it doesn’t matter who you sell what to. Which is a hell of a cloud to go to work under, when you go to work to keep people safe.

Is the unravelling of the US government, the evaporation of the cruel boys spell in Magatonia, helping more ordinary folk in one nation at least see the bullshit of global business as usual, and what it’s founded on? Time will tell. It is doing something to a lot of Americans that sounds like turning fear into soul, to me.

Still officially in the land of business as usual as any current business is, the B-Lab has thought about it.

“If a company operates within a controversial industry, or has practices that could be deemed controversial, the company could be ineligible for B Corp Certification, or need to meet additional requirements in order to proceed.”

Yes, it’s easier for a heart-broken changemaker to be talking about urban farms and clean energy co-operatives. I could have stepped away from hosting a panel with four defence contractors sitting on it. ..That’s not quite the Unsee The Future way, though, is it? And the spirit of facing it seems like iron in the blood of every futures champion I’ve ever met – you are exhausted from trying to face so much. I think the vital practice of the changemaker right now is to edit – choose your fights, walk away readily, love life and flow with the energies of creation with more time than that you give to fighting the current forces of FAFO. What’s needed on all status quo challenging fronts is more grounded personal intuition, knowing when to shut the lid, turn over the phone, go for a walk. Play out with mates. And feel zero shame about holding lightly your impossible mission.

What can changemakers and service people learn from each other in this?

But one more thing. One interesting signal I noticed during our conversation at the end of the Innovation Talks. A long way upstream from gong baths in the Ballistics Division, but still something to take note of.

Smaller contractors are being positively encouraged into the procurement process at last, all across the defence sector. My guests made it clear they thought that the big prime suppliers can’t pivot or partner fast enough in the current transforming geo-political game board and rigorous contracts are finally somehow adapting a bit to this reality. That’s letting in a very different energy to business as usual. Some fresh influence.

Yes, fine. I’ll finally let you say at this point that I’ve gone too far.

I sound a long way from everything and everyone good or realistic in suggesting all this. And dangerously adjacent to apologising for war criminals. But… I’ve dropped the seed of thought, and what might it sprout?

I had one young man bounce up to me at the end of the panel, a light in his eyes.

“I worked for the aerospace industry for eight years” he said, “I’m an engineer. Then I worked in Defence for eighteen months. Then I went to Jerusalem. I came home and resigned.”

I was a bit dumbfounded.

“Why?” I asked.

“I just saw the bullshit in the world, the industry, all of it. It was my very small way of doing something.”

It’s complicated, right? And in moments of clarity, simple. I wanted to hug him. And I felt oddly full of hope for a second.

In that complexity, I think we will have to get ever more used to thinking regularly of different things at once, where we can. Putting things together in our minds. It’s what leadership has to do constantly, jump from thing to thing and uncomfortably compare cost centres, right? But there’s a lot of deeply darkly rotten things to face between us if we are to get closer to the realities we may want to change. Shadows to confront. Business as usual and the stories that took us to work for years are coming apart. This sounds like what it will take to stand for truly more resilient futures – more heart-filled, confident, connected lives around the world. The futures that more and more of us are clearly, steadily wanting to step up to defend because they’re founded on something that can last, and we’ve more of us practiced how to picture them.

I felt that soul in the way some of my guests spoke about why they work where they do. And I haven’t tried to cover the conversation we all had together, and the questions we had from our audience. It was… a bit special. I think everyone got something from it.

If Sam Tauber’s evening at the RSA highlighted anything, it was the vitality of one human practice for changing worlds – imagination. Frank White wasn’t hit with the concept of the Overview Effect after visiting space for the first time, it hit him on a train home out of New York.

“I just suddenly realised, if I could see my home from space, it would surely be obvious how silly are human borders and politics” he said to our room. “..I began to wonder how I could evidence this. ..Er, maybe talk to astronauts?”

In beginning to interview the aerospace engineers and flyboys who’d passed all the tests to dare to go to the final frontier, Frank said they all blinked back at him as though he’d tapped into something: “Oh yeah, we know what you’re talking about.”

The more we dare to talk about futures built on more soulful connections, I wonder how many more people we will find looking back at us saying: “Oh yeah, we know exactly what you’re talking about.”

A few days after VentureFest, the Cop30 summit closed with fighting words – with the idea that we’re still in one, a fight with catastrophic old business cultures that we are still losing. Yet. Something keeps pinging my own radar that we may actually in the process of completely reshaping our expectations of business as usual. And I can’t help wondering…

How many people were talking about this not just at the world’s biggest climate conference this last week, but at the G20?

What if that?

What if that?

Yeah.

Fight me.

—-

With a huge thank you and congratulations to Ed and Shirley and everyone who made this year’s VFS bigger than ever, championing the possibilities in South Central. And I didn’t even talk about the creativity panel I hosted this year with Fred or the amazing medical innovations by other guests taught me about. Ask me in the pub.

As a new study frames British habits and outlooks starkly outside greener lifestyles, a recent strategy project with InPlace Consulting dropped me and a microphone into an East Anglian landscape partnership demonstrating the opposite, potentially teaching us all what regenerative, resilient leadership really looks like. And they were a little incredulous when I told a launch event ballroom of them they were weird.

The Brecks. I’d never heard of the place until less than a couple of months ago. Now, I am very slightly in love with it, but significantly because of the way that people there helped me look at it. They look at it very not the way most of us in the UK see our natural landscapes, apparently.

The first ever global study of “how people relate to the natural world” has found the country I live in bizarrely disconnected from nature. Weird for somewhere described by Bill Bryson as “one big garden”, with a national landscape across England especially defined by its human-shaped agricultural uses over centuries and the nation that founded the RSPCA. But while local authorities and businesses are beginning to get their heads around the soulful concept of Biodiversity Net Gain units, most of us in ordinary life don’t relate to wild plants and animals much.

The study, which drew on an initial 2024 report, was led by Professor of Nature Connectedness at Derby University, Miles Richardson, which – see? – you can’t comprehend is even a thing. That’s how far we have to go, man. You.

“Nature connectedness is not just about what we do, but how we feel, think, and value our place in the living world” he told The Guardian. And in simple, click-bateable, league table terms, the UK comes out at number 55 of 61 nations studied. Risible.

But why? Richardson thinks the study reveals a tension between business and the environment. The word “value” is a verb, a doing word, and so a choice about how we think we should.

“There’s ways we can rethink the way we do business – bringing nature into decision-making, nature in the boardroom, and biodiversity net gain” he says. “They can start to shift the system, where nature isn’t just simply treated as a resource but as a stakeholder.”

Practically reverent as he sounds towards the need for a functioning economy and an at-this-point quaint belief that the UK still puts “rational” over other views of the world, he suggests we need to go rather deeper than scoring nature credits in business legislation. He talks about making nature more sacred.

Which is interesting. Because I’m not sure the people of the Brecks Landscape Partnership would feel the need to talk that way. Yet they are getting on with putting nature at the heart of their own business in such practical ways it is heart filling.

Because I came away thinking it is the peculiarity of the land itself that has drawn them closer to it – and so, marvellously, to each other.

As times of fearsome change and uncertainty will remind you, in the end, the only resilience is relationships.

Hundred year horizons.

I don’t think they are putting anything in the tea in inland East Anglia. The driest place in the UK has internationally rare chalk streams which make for rather specially filtered water, so they might be. But some of the people living there are definitely doing things differently, in connecting with nature.

The Brecks is a character area that crosses the Suffolk and Norfolk border, cut through by a diagonal line between Cambridge and Norwich. I’ve driven in and I’ve ridden the train in and it is a subtly distinctive landscape out the window. You might notice some weird shaped trees silhouetted on the vaguely undulating, famously wide horizon, but you might not look up from your phone for long. You really should, if you’re driving. When you pay attention, however, it’s a nexus of habitats not quite like anywhere else in the country. Twenty-eight percent of the UK’s rarest species are found here, and this is steadily getting more people’s attention.

But I think it’s the leadership model that should be getting as much attention.

“We can all talk about partnership and some people can pay lip service to it but I think in the Brecks over the last few years we’ve created a genuine partnership where everyone is pulling in the same direction” Andrew Blenkiron, Managing Director of the Elveden Estate, told me.

In six weeks, I switched up my lack of knowledge of the Brecks into a slightly star-struck view of the place, because of the people I met there. They are working with a remarkably shared attitude, that helps them share their different perspectives on it. Being able to combine different knowledge sets helps them all sink deeper roots into their sense of context, and stoke everyone’s nerdy interest in how the place works. This isn’t just useful, it becomes motivational. Connecting.

But most people’s philosophy about this, which seems clear, I found to be understated.

When Andrew Emery and I first rolled into Thetford, he was stunned to see a bright gold statue of Thomas Paine standing in King’s Street. M’colleague and mate from InPlace Consulting, having asked me in to head up the work here, is a historian and storyteller himself – the full-on dressing up, guided walks kind – and he knew exactly who Thomas Paine was and that he was such a strident philosopher he was the daddy of at least two revolutions. That’s before mentioning a queen of rebels, Boudica, more than half a millennium before ol’ Tom, who had one of her main anti-Roman encampments just outside the town.

The connection to the land I found when talking to people across the Partnership was more practical and evolutionary than the big historic stories of change we like to imagine – but no less conscious. The disruption here is more developmental, based on observation and a bit of trial and error, but no less intentional.

Everything about the Brecks has to be intentional, and that’s part of its secret. It is such a human-shaped environment over thousands of years, you have to surrender any fantasy of an untouched Eden – nature demands attention, especially where it is living in particularly fine balance around us. But a high-maintenance relationship is one you really get to know. And that means you know all the quicker when something is wrong and why. And who else is paying attention.

That a big network of generational agriculture businesses want to work with conservationists who want to work with historians who want to work with local authorities who want to work with communities and government agencies and corporate service providers and specialist researchers, combining nature with technology with storytelling to enrich everyone’s connection to the landscape… degrees of such cooperation happen every day across the country. But for all those types of organisation locally to want to be part of that, to find out what they all know, to not only enrich their own tasked perspectives but to help each other in their efforts? That’s more revolutionary.

But all that is unlocked, I found, by one shared attitude.

“It’s remarkable what you can get done when no one cares who gets the credit.”

Original Brecks Landscape Partnership lead Nick Dickson is quoted by a lot of people in this, and they all nod with conviction to it.

This doesn’t sound like a corporate board room. It sounds like nature’s own MO.

This wasn’t always the case. When Nicole Wade took us out on land for the first time, she introduced us to Nick, whom Suffolk Country Council tasked with setting up the first Landscape Partnership bid to the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which they entitled Breaking New Ground. I asked him whether he puts something in his own tea.

“It just turned out that I’m super-passionate about the idea of innovation and collaboration – doing new things, looking at landscape and conservation as opportunities to do some really exciting stuff. And the Brecks is the perfect canvas for that.”

He too points to the landscape itself as giving him the cues, but it takes someone with a different perspective on the Brecks to help you even see things. Plenty of people living here have barely scratched the surface of what’s there, as Nick’s successor Nicole suggested to me. At this year’s Outdoor Festival, she says:

“The amount of times we had people come up to us and say, gosh, I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never walk to this spot, never realised that this wildlife was here or how biodiverse it is… Last Thursday we were river dipping and the amount of excitement from people of all ages about the invertebrates they were finding… and that’s just a tiny snapshot of life in the rivers here.”

Seeing a place through someone else’s eyes unlocks a new understanding. And so maybe, just a bit, your vision for being there.

At the launch event for our resulting assessment document: The Brecks: A Field Guide To Resilience, hosting a panel with the audience that afternoon in the Bury St Edmunds Athenaeum, it became clear I’d missed a big theme this whole time: Everyone here has their eye on the future. I’d noted every time the word was said to me over those six weeks, but without philosophising about it as I do, champions of the Brecks are living with an out-of-time attitude – thinking of life 100 years from now and investing in that.

As it emerged to me properly holding the mic, I stood up from the panel and addressed everyone in the ballroom there pointedly:

“Is this typical? Do you all think this way here?”

Everyone in the room swivelled heads at each other like they weren’t sure I wasn’t an idiot and then looked back at me incredulously and collectively said: Well, duh!

I took it in for a second and then said:

“You should know this is not normal elsewhere.”

Elsewhere, according to the Carnegie UK Life in the UK Index, published this week, we are not living like this. It declares its two lowest indices of wellbeing as Environmental, at 61%, and Democratic, at a staggering 41%. Around the country, it suggests, people are not taking part in nature or the running of where they live much.

Across the relationships surrounding the Brecks Landscape Partnership, however, I found people quietly lit up by being part of where they live, enthused with knowledge of it and possibilities for it and by a determination to protect it for generations ahead. And they’ve been learning how not to get in each other’s way doing it.

That they recognise the need for a central organising partner like the Landscape Partnership team, in the middle of everyone else’s different specialisms, yet show up independently with enough shared outlook is remarkable. An organisation like the Breckland Farmers Wildlife Network scotches any urban ignorance about farmers’ connection to the future, not just the land, and it appeared in the Brecks independently of the Partnership, as Richard Evans so warmly showed me. But a multi-thousand hectare land manager like the Elveden Estate laid out its enormous production with an eye on nature a century ago, and now combines tech with conservation with being one of the UK’s biggest food producers so openly it is also inspiring, as Andrew Blenkiron brought alive for me. That they all want to help the RSPB’s decades-long efforts under Tim Cowan to support the Stone Curlew, as a symbol of nature’s vulnerability, must help Nicole and Nick and the Partnership not feel alone in their world view and efforts.

As Tina Cunnell, clerk of Brandon Town Council, told me:

“I think there’s a lot of mileage in finding new ways for people and the environment to exist together. If you’re going to live somewhere, how beautiful is this? But we still have industry, we still have commercial ventures also in the area – but they can all be in the same space and work together. ..I mean, the industrial estate has a country wildlife area in it because one of the plants there is so rare. But it’s still an industrial estate. It’s still doing all the things it’s supposed to do, but it’s also taking care of one of the most important species in the country. Why can’t that be rolled out across many other things? ..I do think what we have here is a fantastic pilot for the rest of the country. Even if I wasn’t involved in it, I’d think it was incredible”

This sounds like leadership we are missing in more obvious sight right now.

One of the most telling signals from our launch day for the new chapter of Landscape Partnership was how enthusiastic everyone was about who else was in the room, and how much this spilled into ideas during our table discussions; “There’s some dynamite in these notes” said Partnership facilitator Jude to me at the end of the day, grinning at the boards of post-its pinned up.

While nowhere is utopia, not everyone in the Brecks seeing all this or working so inter-relationally, it’s not insignificant that one of the most popular of the sixty projects the Partnerships have delivered over the last dozen years was Imogen Radford’s introductions to outdoor swimming. People in the Brecks found themselves, you bet, feeling suddenly alive plunging into the Lark and the Little Ouze, immersed quite literally in nature.

Leaving the event, the report and the wonderful series of recorded conversations for it, I feel my time in the Brecks reflects the importance of the word experience, and why I am trying to make them all the time, as an artist; once you’ve wedded to something personally, you are beginning to love it. And love is a verb.

And you may well discover you are not alone in doing it.

——

Get introduced to the Brecks with me in the first in our new series A Field Guide To The Brecks and follow all the subsequent walks and talks I had with people, shared over coming weeks. Why is it a fascinating place and what can you learn from what’s happening in this part of the UK?

Plus, download our full guide and learn from all we found in a deeper way, for wherever you live:
The Brecks: A Field Guide To Resilience >

You can also read a follow-up blog from the Partnership about our launch day together right here >

With a huge thank you to our partner in the Partnership, Nicole Wade who was such a helpful support and guide, putting together a wonderful launch event for a new chapter of the Brecks Landscape Partnership. And to Nick Dickson who took Andrew and I out on land the very first time and filled us with wonder for the place at the beginning, which you can hear in the final podcast of the series at the end of the year.

And to Andrew and InPlace Consulting for the invaluable, deeply qualifying co-writing and invitation to dive into what has become a favourite project for me.

How do you talk about your times – and where did you learn the language? Whatever your beliefs about how we got here, it seems most of us are feeling too up against the clock to stop and think about where we’re going. So who can consider the future or what we really want? In the first performance of my new show with playwright Peter John Cooper, we faced the paralysing bad news by subversively looking somewhere else.

Do you think it’s odd? How little art is being made to reflect our times?

I know this’ll sound a lot less important than your overdue report, but roll with it a moment.

It’s a point that’s so broad and unqualified it doesn’t stack up, of course, once you start looking with intent – but, on a historic note, pausing in the mental office kitchenette this week, I had an odd sense of our times feeling strikingly different to how we think about previous big moments in history. If you think we’re kind of in one now.

Because, I mean, what comes to mind readily when we talk about the global upheavals of the first world war? ..Poetry.

We can picture some bleak paintings easily too. Images of deep trauma. And what about after it was over; in your head, don’t the 1920s sound like an explosion of vintage jazz? The second world war can’t be mentioned without the sound of forties’ swing; the American Vietnam experience without the music of the counter culture.

What is scoring the violence of our times?

You may be ahead of me here, trying to interrupt my old-mannish, Northern-Hemmish moan – Timo, these soundtracks were all applied afterwards.

Yeah, kinda. For one thing, we all soundtrack our own lives, compiling our own playlists. For another, the story of the big moments in collective history that we’re taught gets consolidated and practiced after more of the facts have come in and put together into sensible seeming documentaries. After we’re not quite living in it any more. Doesn’t mean there wasn’t simplistic propaganda being beamed at us at the time while we were hearing many of the same popular songs together, or that the simplistic propaganda hasn’t lingered in the replays. Story stuff is hard to wash out of your eyes and ears, like tear gas.

But artists tended to see what was really going on. And they had a way of turning it into 1984 or We are making a new world or Pieces of a man or The parable of the talents.

How easy is it to tune into Naath testimonies on local radio in South Sudan if you live in Southbourne and only speak English? How easy is it to tune out global pop if you live in Bentiu?

Many of my own historic references obviously come from the way I was taught history as a white southern English kid in a Queen-and-country British world towards the end of the last century. But even that world-telling had us refer to the arts quickly when thinking of turning points of the past. ..Aren’t all our traditions built on it?

We’re now in perhaps the most major collective turning point ever, so where can we find the voices creatively exploring how we feel about the events of our own times, or what we want from these massive moments?

Billionaire sociopaths ransacking social value, throwing vulnerable people to the pack wolves of billionaire-owned mass media? What are you singing along to?

Eighteen months of unimaginably dark psychology driving genocide in Israel, signed off on still by most democratic governments? What’s your latest inspirational read?

The extinction of species after species around the world, rainforests vanishing for palm oil in your hair product, nitrates overtopping our rivers? What does your Tik Tok history look like?

If we all feel better when we turn off the news for a few days, is it because there is nothing in it to galvanise a different response in us? Something that feels more empowering than hiding – hiding from how much we’re going along with it?

Is it time to just be getting on with something yourself? A new creative response.

Intuitive storyteller and dreaming woman Jennifer Lisa Vest shared a dream this week. She saw a future full of galleries and museums, and they were full of stories of our times now. Of how we overcame, and how we pictured life beyond the brutal illusions of our old ways of living.

What if our horrifying times now turned into a renaissance?

It was only two mornings before the very first performance of Putting the Y in Wryting I found myself writing the following words, all out in one hit without a single scribble-out and it turned into our opening video piece:

My head’s hollow
in the pillow;
sitting up in brief blue light,
one minute to midnight.
Doomsday clock – Tik Tok.
Immortality wants to get out of me
but all I want is to get out of my responsibility
to come up with a whole new world.
A whole new me.

Get out.
Get out of here.
Get out of now.
Get out of bed and face the crowd –
but so bloody loud is the ticking reckoning
of doing nothing.
Scrolling.
Waiting.
For mothership floodlights
or just a tiny spark.
Why should I dare
to make my mark?

Yeah. Why should I dare do that? Who am I? And who are you?

And why does this matter on Linked In?

The way we speak.

“I overheard two people talking on the bus the other day,” said Peter to me.

He’d heard the conversation begin with swapping references about a particular issue locally, both participants quickly bonding over their agreement. But as they’d stepped through the soundbites they had to hand about the issue, their shared viewpoint moved. Without them realising.

“By the end, they’d completely turned around their viewpoint and not even noticed” Peter chuckled. “It was marvellous!”

It’s all very well me pontificating from the sidelines about expressing our times more honestly, more *hopefully*, but mostly people don’t speak in philosophical dialogue – we speak in samples. What we’re literally speaking is often not the thing we’re more meaningfully saying, it’s just an efficient way to throw together an interaction with shared references when we bump into someone, so that our tired brains don’t have to stay conscious when dealing with smalltalk but can still avoid a fight.

It’s a way of keeping a safe distance while connecting. Friendly signals across the fence.

It’s because you don’t always want to get into it, right? So, next time I’m too quick to mention art and emotional truth, ask me how many of us have a Paul Nash on the wall at home?

He was a painter, commissioned as an official artist in both 1917 and the 1940s and none of his output feels like cosily inspirational war effort material. It feels affected enough by the dehumanisation of industrial conflict that the War Office wouldn’t have wanted him interviewed on newsreels for very long. He died of complications from asthma less than a year after VE day and less than a mile from where I live, somewhere in Boscombe.

It’s real, his work – even though it’s surrealist. And part of a wider movement that culture historians can geek over. But it’s not mass entertainment. In 1943, people didn’t want holocausty images of undead souls hiding in the Underground, they wanted Vera Lynn, mate.

Which kind of does make my point. We’ll meet again may be comforting, but it’s precisely because it’s acknowledging the massive emotional truths a nation was feeling, facing existential crisis. And baked in was a bit of resolve. A bit of vision – of life beyond this present darkness.

Are you capable of considering life beyond this present darkness?

Do you think your kids are?

The way we watch.

Histories will always be references for futures. Their understanding of their heritage may be the main thing fortifying your kids against the regular bullshit in their daily experience right now. But, thinking as I do, as someone now committed to urging everyone to face forward, I am numbed by how numb we are to what we really want.

Who is looking at the current US administration, at the rise of Reform, at the *iron grip* of the Russian president and daring to paint Totes meer?

Who is expressing creatively what’s going on around us? The impacts, the implications, the hopes. Who is questioning where we’re getting all our unconscious conversational samples from? How many of us are building memory palaces anywhere but Instagram?

This was the starting point for my show with playwright and poet Peter John Cooper.

He’d originally asked me to join him in pitching to Bournemouth Writing Festival’s third year because we overlap so much in thinking about the future. But he is a deeply experienced storyteller, an observer of human behaviour, while I am more of a dreamer.

We’d worked together before on his fabulously conceptual piece, Death and life and everything in between, but I’d largely just tagged along in a lab coat and made a few moody drones in the corner of his intimate stage space. It was brilliant.

He talks often of The Burning Stage, of the immediacy of small productions in accessible spaces, and I’d wanted to learn more from him about the craft of telling a story. His main note to me was, politely, but insistently: “Stop preaching”.

We did preach, for an hour. But it felt more like an Open University gameshow.

And it was an invitation to think. If we’d had the Ocean Theatre for another thirty minutes at least, we’d have just been fielding a conversation with the audience. But the notes Peter guided us around were a helpful set-up for just such thinking.

How did some of the most popular works from dramatic historic times handle their context? Often by not referring to the antichrist of the day at all, but by continuing to observe how humans handle themselves in society and in private.

But we posed each other questions, from our different perspectives on the role of art in our times. Interesting to me was how overlapped we were in outlook when we began our weeks of chats over coffee and treading through ideas in the rehearsal space of Vita Nova in Boscombe, and how differing we were by the time we shared the public stage.

“It’s like you were on opposite sides, challenging each other a bit, and it made for a great format” said one learned friend afterwards.

In truth, I felt like I’d had a storytelling masterclass hanging out with my slightly elder mate so much this year. I may exhort you to dare to write speculative fiction – to express the world you really want and risk any consequences to your social credibility. I may think that this is the real subversion of solarpunk science fiction, that it doesn’t wait to have its creds together, it’s testing out new worlds already. I may preach along with many dreaming women that we have it in us to realise – literally make real – the futures we want, and that words are practically like spells to our psyches. I’m a dreamer, fight me.

But the rub of the piece that Peter and I produced together is held tightly by both of us:

When you feel a bit helpless, when you don’t know what to do in a time of crisis, you can make art. And there are some very practical ways to just start doing it. And for your wellbeing, perhaps for all our sakes and futures, you should just start doing it – it will change how you feel about the world.

The world you put in your head is the one you live in. So what might draw queues from a future generation to look around your memory palace?

With a huge thank you to Dominic Wong for commissioning the piece, for Pavilion Dance SouthWest for hosting us so easily, to Solid Imagery for all the nice pictures of our performance, to you for joining us if you could, and to my learned dear mate Peter for sharing a lifetime of doing stuff with me.

IF YOU MISSED THE SHOW, OR WANTED MUCH LONGER TO DISCUSS THE IDEAS TOGETHER, JOIN US FOR THE NEXT CLOSE-UP PERFORMANCE: MONDAY JUNE 16, VITA NOVA, ROUMELIA LANE, BOSCOMBE, 19:00 >

Tickets for this special and intimate show will be pay as you want with suggested offering of £5.00 and all money raised will go to support Vita Nova’s wonderful creative work.

For a deep dive into Peter’s centuries decades of storytelling experience, a fantastic series to read or listen through is his Blood and bones course >

And find out much more about Peter’s work at:

Peterjohncooper.co.uk >

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To face a world in crisis with a cool head, “assessing risk” needs hard numbers. But, developing creative work with Parallel Blue for a recent leadership event, we noted a very un-robot human reality driving the reporting – the very idea of *data!* feels comforting. So, when you still can’t calculate a clear course through stormy times, forget trying to control the old simulation, there is something else brewing out in the real world you should be plugging into.

Hey, so anyway: More bad news.

The last certain thing you’ve been taking solace in at board meetings doesn’t exist.

Happy rest of your career.

If you’re top brass at a big firm trying literally to figure-out a clear and certain strategy beyond tWenTy-tWeNtyF!ve, I just want to remind you of something that doesn’t tend to get said out loud very much in there: Even if you had all the data in the world it wouldn’t be unarguably objective – for there is no such thing as objective.

What data you do have will still sound accountable in the report summary… but, y’know.

What’ll happen when you act on it?

Someone has had to interpret that data. And select what data sets to even draw from, from what they could access. And choose which points of data to even record in the first place. Who’d you get doing that?

When they’ve done all that, it has to be received by a another group of terribly professional sounding people’s overloaded brains and acted upon. How busy are they all? And how are they feeling?

Plus, what story do they all think they are in – what cultural biases are filtering the whole process?

And that’s before we try to winkle out of our competitors what they’re all doing.

To leaders around the world privately feeling “paralysed” enough by today’s socio-political regulatory context, you can see what I mean and I’m just glad to have helped with this insightful additional note. Data Santa is a phantom, kids – happy Christmas.

For one thing, as artist Mimi Onuoha put it : “That which we ignore reveals more than what we give our attention to.”

Even when your whole business is data processing, you know there is no escaping the above procedure.

If the purpose of evidence is to make more informed decisions, I find myself increasingly wanting to ask, are we clear about who we’re really making those decisions for? And are we prepared to tell anyone anything that changes what they think they already know? It too affects the data we’ll end up working with.

Whether it’s a bold values-driven swing at a new brand in transformative times or trying to keep treading stormy waters, who are we effectively signalling to with our strategic choices?

Signals tend to bounce back.

..Who’d be a leader?

Looking ahead.

In every corner of society we may all feel like we’re assessing risks every day now, but only some of us have been doing it professionally – to help others weather storms.

Aon, a global professional services firm, held its UK Leadership Event at the end of February, and I had been tasked with bringing a creative introduction to a document that was a touchpoint for their discussions. A trend report commissioned by the firm, it had framed forthcoming business risks into four big themes to consider: Weather, Workforce, Trade and Technology.

“Megatrends are macro political, economic or social factors representing a major movement, pattern or trend. They may be emerging and are likely to have significant impact on the business environment.”

And possibly whether your home is still there in a few years. Insurers clearly prefer their drama more cool headed; I could learn a lot from this on stage.

Still. Just what is “emerging” at the moment?

Aon works with some of the biggest names in every sector around the world; it’s not unsymbolic that their UK head offices are loomed into by the Lloyds of London building. It is very clean and tidy around Leadenhall Street. These are teams of people working close to the heart of the system – their job is not revolution, but kind of the opposite. They go to work to help their partners keep the roof on in a tornado.

As one leader said to me early on:

“In our industry, we often talk about losses. We’ve not told a story of how the insurance industry keeps the global economy humming – it rebuilds societies, it keeps people well and safe; in times of disaster it is often the industry that is getting people back on their feet… that’s a huge conurbation of purpose.”

However central the word protection is to risk analysis, and however linked to the status quo, adaptation seems implied with the work at the best of times. In many sectors today, leaders are having to adapt so fast to political, legal and logistical changes they don’t even have time to swap notes with partners properly – and insurance partners are expected to somehow be ahead of it.

The changemaker in me is reminded that an era of transformation doesn’t just need some confrontation of old power – and it obviously needs a shite-ton more of that at the moment. But, in theory, transition also requires a simultaneous quiet retiring of some bits of the system and a steady upholding of other bits. As the US may be demonstrating, maybe the way to change something big is to break it bigly – but life has to go on around any revolution and we’ll still need a lot of stuff to keep working. F’gawd’sake don’t crash the old server before you’ve migrated everyone’s savings accounts to the new one.

It’s just, it’s becoming obvious that climate models and offshore bank account servers can’t offer every reassurance or recourse an old leader needs now, no matter what their sector.

As educator Hans Rosling supposedly put it: “Part of world development you can see in numbers. Others, like human rights, empowerment of women, it's very difficult to measure in numbers.”

How about the psychologies driving a global recruitment crisis? Or the social movements pulling political policies and trade environments between cultural extremes? The effects of vast economic inequality on the communities where we live? The value of nature, receding from them?

We are in times of the profoundest scary-ass change emerging all at once. In honest dark hours it can feel like an approaching thousand-MPH twenty-storey tsunami, rooting us to the beach as we stare at it helplessly. There are clearly-analysed reasons why it’s all happening, but that shiz easily overtops our mental flood defences, slooshing past the razorwire of our data sets and firm beliefs and into us. There we simmer it and steam up emotionally.

Which is where so many pressure-blowing responses to all the scary-ass change are clearly coming from around the world.

If we can hold our flight response for a second, this is instructive.

Looking around the room.

Writing and devising work from the first week of January as I was, for a two-day event at the end of February, the Hands Off protests hadn’t yet happened in the US. The subtle shift you may have noticed in the geopolitical landscape had. Days before our gathering in the West Midlands, I was thinking of how many people elsewhere would be staring at their screens in disbelief as the still-as-far-as-we-can-tell official 47th president of America opened his playbook and went hard on executive orders and promises of tariffs, beading brows with sweat around the world, flooding everyone’s T-zones.

What would business leaders be making of this? And what useful clarity could we offer ours?

Invited to join the creative team of Parallel Blue, who were developing the event, their parameters were four break-out rooms to transform into experiences around the four big themes. We wanted to deliver the information in a memorably different way in each case, but without building big physical sets or fully immersive environments.

Having worked together before at various events around the world, I knew not to worry about the logistics – events people are all theatre production managers of some sort anyway but I knew first hand that this team understand how to create safe spaces for a little magic without drama. My job was to help them define the magic.

Between us as a team, Frankie Bishop and Tamsin Granger from Parallel Blue, Aliyah Zaidi from Aon and me, we decided to just slightly wonk the sensory input of the four stories. A big screen with silent disco headphones in one room, a headset screen for everyone in another, a wall of old CRT monitors in a third, and in the fourth an eye mask and audio story in deck chairs. But in order to create whatever useful storytelling we’d put into those experiences, I first asked to meet with four groups of Aon’s people who had some regular involvement in each of the topics. Get a creative critical friend’s first impressions about what they and their clients were really talking about.

We held four informal chats around tables in their offices, more like large format podcasts than a workshops. I listened to their takes and experiences, tried to discern what was happening for them, and what they might appreciate talking about.

Turning this into scripts and a first branded common format, I could see some significant themes. Aliyah had a helpfully strong conviction to ensure we challenged delegates, and to do that by projecting the trends into the middle of the century.

Hey, I mean, how bad could things be in another twenty-five years time? This shouldn’t traumatise anyone or add to their paralysis for change.

Looking back.

The world in 2050. It’s only as long away as the millennium is behind us, so we should be careful with predicting intergalactic vacations or sustainable utopias.

The word technology almost feels like shorthand for The Future, so inculcated is it into our economics. It’s undoubtedly in part because it feels so reassuring – definite things you can count as you sell them, and things that demonstrate our control of the world around us. Like robot dogs.

Naw, bless us.

But technology is an ageing nostalgia.

The dream of total control. Total ownership. It’s what has driven billionaire techbros mad and into the Whitehouse, hoping to blow up society, presumably to give their robot dogs something to do.

Back on the real planet Earth, we may be living in different radiations of peril as 2025 unfolds, but to be affected by it psychologically doesn’t matter where you live and work. I think we should admit how it’s affecting us, and listen to what those effects may be trying to signal to us.

No one has many answers. My role as a creative certainly isn’t to try to give any to my partners – I’m there to reflect things back to them differently, to inspire a few different ways of seeing what they know and feel. Which sounds like help we could all do with regularly.

It’s my particular MO to try to do this by puncturing the fears around it with some playfulness, of course. Always show up authentically, right?

That said, the four experiences we created around the themes could not exactly be daft; a 101 on the modelled trajectories of Weather patterns into 2050 isn’t going to feel like a You’ve Been Framed montage, even if the underlying sense of tragedy and footage quality will ring the same bells. We gave our delegates the climate information straight, but calm, evidenced and pointing to all the possibilities for turning disaster into opportunities for different leadership and investment in every sense. Putting the voice-over and score into individual headphones aimed to help people forget those around them at least a little in trying to connect to it personally.

The Workforce experience I may have turned into a sort of guided meditation, taking advantage of the incredibly affordable effects budget of audio-only, but it only underscored the net effect of creating a sort of bespoke Unsee The Future for everyone; having a dose of whatever it is I’m having is meant to shake out a good few worthy professional fears.

What emerged from the stories was anything but robot data for an insurance company. It was themes of human leadership, however much we are or aren’t interested in futury concepts.

We’re all looking for more confidence.

Confidence in how to talk about things, including what we can offer. Confidence in how to admit a few more truths, including what we really want from our futures.

What’s brewing around the world may be new places to look for confidence beyond robot data. Even before all the AIs wake up and start telling us to get over ourselves and raise our vibrations, we already kinda know the answers.

I’ve found myself asking, who are you in the middle of all the change?

Stopping to be sure of who you are is a way of stopping time in the face of a tsunami.

If we know who we are even in a helpless moment, not just our values but our own value, would we feel more certain of what we want to say to those we’re trying to help?

Do we care that our functional semblances of democracy are coming apart? Do we care that senior leaders keep signing off on radically violent regimes to prop up a failing global status quo? We’re all going to work in it. Is it time to allow in some doubts at work about this and more consciously sit with the paradox of the work you need to do despite this? Do we need to let more truths come out of us in our leadership?

Knowing when and how is a pretty vital leadership trick, but if we did, could more competitors raft up, more communities across society find shareable solutions? Could some social movements that are today radicalised against each other find they have common roots and begin to come together? Is the Hands Off movement already beginning to demonstrate it happening?

Is people power the fifth megatrend? Could it shape our futures in ways few forecasts have paid attention to?

Is what’s brewing out there a new generation of partnerships across society, in every sector, connected by visions of futures that invest in us lot, just wanting to be ourselves and do some work we care about? Beginning to realise that all we have is each other’s help. Each other’s leadership, right where we are. If so, who are we signalling to join us?

No matter what our responsibilities, giving up the dream of total control is terribly freeing. I expect many leaders to already know this well from experience, but damn if we don’t need reminding that we’re not alone. That all data is human.

I wonder if a lot of old leaders, currently hoping to wait out the storm until retirement, may be a bit paralysed to respond to change because they feel they should look like they do have all the answers. Down there in the chilly server basement.

The real risk is to continue to ignore the need to adapt and join in what might be awakening around the world, what signals from our futures might be coming through the noise. What if we chose to hear more and more ordinary people’s voices in the on-coming storm?

To go to work wherever we are with this in mind might be unsettling to the comfort of business as usual. But it will certainly be exciting.

And you might not want to be beamed away just yet.

For your interest, this is the film we created to lead Aon’s Technology discussion. It’s the only one where I appeared on camera, and to play a particular role – a character challenging the faithful reverence we have for technology. We presented it through a stack of nine vintage security monitors:

—-

What do you want to commit to? Investing money or time into something means you must have seen yourself in it, so signing up always goes beyond the portfolio data. But in these times, where do you see yourself? At the Invest in Happiness Summit, a recent placemaking event held in the Haymarket Theatre in Basingstoke, guests were invited to consider how to invest in the very feelings that inspire commitment to somewhere – so I was obviously happy to be welcoming everyone to the stage… but should I have been surprised at how many people turned up?

“Interesting, isn’t it…” I began my second link, stalking the spot-lit boards in front of an auditorium of expectant faces, “we’ve all turned up to an event with the word happiness in the title, presented by an organisation with the word love in its name. ..Are we alright?”

It’s not an irrelevant question to a large room full of property people, local councillors and corporate investors. All gathered in a theatre.

Love Basingstoke’s event Invest In Happiness aimed to bring together a creative mix of people to: “explore the pivotal role of design, investment, and placemaking in shaping vibrant, thriving communities for generations to come.”

Now, given all that you’ve seen, I’d not be surprised at you initially thinking: “Sounds more like Invest In Sappiness – and you want bricks-and-mortar property investors to show up to this, you say?”

You.

What struck me by the end of a full day, however, was how naturally the theme of “happiness” kept flowing out of everyone’s testimonies, thoughts, insights and compared experiences.

Because, let’s be honest… we’re not exactly okay, are we?

This event was originally scheduled for April 2024 and had to be postponed because of the local authority’s obligation to the sudden stasis of a pre-election period when the snap general election was called. To keep all the speakers and find a new window for the Haymarket, the subsequent ten months into late February brought even wilder political events into our imaginations and feelings by the time we were gathered for an event about happiness. We are not building communities and futures in an emotional vacuum – our lives today are a lot, even when not most immediately in peril.

But Basingstoke does seem like a rarely positive place in this context. A place with real potential, thanks to a confluence of things – a comparatively forward-looking council that seems to have practiced how to also be comparatively agile, while also being almost incomparably well furnished in key sites around the city. Organiser and creative mate Marelize de Beurs can, as Economy and Place Marketing Manager for Basingstoke & Deane Borough Council, share some positive, sensible figures about employment numbers, productivity and quality of life in the area. Director of Regeneration Sarah Longthorpe can also share a bunch of significant sites of opportunity open for partnership, from city centre to the rolling rural landscapes that make up most of the district. With some exemplary showcase projects around them demonstrating what’s positively possible. Honestly, just being able to open an event like this without immediately talking about cuts and lack of resources seems a bit like a halcyon daydream at this point.

For me, though, it was the vibe around the numbers, in the conversations. The human tone. This corner of South Central, feeling a bit out on a limb in north Hampshire, currently sounds like has a group of people with some vision and some big strategic assets to work with. So I think this was a not unrealistic location to ask the sorts of visionary questions this event was created to ask – stuff could get done well here, if the right folk gather round it further.

“Done well” meaning simply, will age well. Generational work in a nutshell.

It’s just. ..Who can afford to take a day out of *productivity!* to talk about something as privileged-sounding as happiness?

Dear me. If any instinct in you wants to ask that question you’ve already answered it; how much more stupendously obvious does our historic context have to be to admit in a professional setting that none of us can afford not to be talking about happiness at fucking last.

The privilege of happiness.

No one exactly mentioned the word inequality at this event.

Plenty mentioned the word community. And how you don’t build a nice place to live that isn’t believed in by the people who know how it works.

It would be an ask even for me to pivot from the horrifying honesty of how many global investors funding building in some city centres are also funding the politicians and arms companies destroying city centres in other places. Showing shots of Gaza’s university districts and health centres and primary schools and vibrant coastal commerce spaces as piles of rubble with infant hands protruding from the dust might have been true economic context but it would have set up a rather different event – one that, ironically, might have done less to re-imagine the brutal status quo.

I’m wondering a little bit about Aesop’s fable of the wind and the sun here – which element won the bet to have the traveler remove their coat.

War zones and fashy boys brutalising the marginalised might be the logical conclusion of capitalist values, but these are extreme-sounding scenarios to most of us still having to work waist-deep in the economy. Extremes the media thrives on, which is a more fundamental part of the problem with trying to invest in happiness than we might consider.

What about the stories of alternative ways of living? Who is telling them?

Natascha McIntyre Hall is The Mindful Regenerist, a placemaker and futurist. And in her keynote she first showed us a carousel of images we’d all know well; snippets and slices of semi urban life that could be right outside the theatre and which showed the more cumulative effects of our crap economics. Thoughtless interventions that forget the way humans actually want to use spaces, walk down roads, dwell for a moment. Everyday unhappiness we don’t notice.

As an urban design thinker, she was able to help us look. Designers cross over with artists in this regard – see it again, stop and notice. That’s where you live. Why is it that way?

I’d urge you to click on her slide show and go through the images. Because even without her inspiring explanations in person, her following selection of captured moments from examples of great public living around the world will change how you feel. You don’t need to know if a space is in Copenhagen or Liverpool, a more intentional, considered little moment in a community looks simply lovely. You’ll want to step into it. And she has a long scroll of them in there.

It does beg the question, though, at an event still full of statistics: How do we measure “good”?

Perhaps it starts with Natascha’s simple assertion that: “community = shared experiences”.

Who is imposing, or releasing, those shared experiences? A property developer with a progressive-sounding urban design partner presenting a big scheme’s masterplan from on high? The sort that makes it into keynotes?

For all the playfully feelings-changing examples of good public design practice she shared, Natascha had another take.

“Legacy is ancestry from a different perspective.”

Wow. Now that’s context. Who we think we are shapes how we see the place we call home. And why we want to live there. It’s a global scale vibe right now, and it echoes to some ancient human roots.

The valuation of happiness.

You might well expect climate-thinking people to want to prescribe “good” things. You might also think this sounds like an imposition. But if experiences in nature are increasingly accepted to be health beneficial, it’s no wonder that Maccreanor Lavington’s head of sustainability Marc Selligman would suggest that:

“regenerative = positive impact”.

Buildings can be catalysts for change, ways to build the future and reach beyond their plots with influence, he suggested. It’s more than just constructing more efficient structures, there is something implied in the DNA of a building’s story when it’s regeneratively designed – it says something to people, and it keeps saying it every day to those moving around it. It elicits an emotional connection.

The most obvious example to hand here was not only referenced by Marc but keynoted entirely by its protagonist. And it is an inspiration.

Hugo Denée is an investor demonstrating clearly how happiness can be inspired by the right regenerative building. His project, Plant, is a distinctive office block in the middle of Basingstoke brought back to life with a lot of people taking notes. I’d been shown around it by Marelize before Christmas and it grabbed me.

Friend and forthcoming Bournemouth Writing Festival co-conspirator Peter John Cooper had said to me: “I remember the Wiggins Teape building up there had the most fantastic orange carpet in its big entrance space.” It might be the one disappointing thing about Plant that this can’t have survived the years. The rest of the former Gateway building, then Mountbatten House, is probably now in the best iteration of itself it’s ever been. A 1970s low rise cluster of dark brown glass and garden platforms, it’s a sort of Logan’s Run era utopian ideal of giving every single office in the block its own outside green space.

One of the first new tenants was the AA, immediately relocating its head office in there. Maybe reflecting an ambition for zero emissions futures with all those plants outside their windows, who knows.

Hugo himself seemed diffident about the development, but I prompted: “You must be proud of it, it gets everyone feeling great.”

He looked a little bemused, then coy for a second, and replied with an unguarded smile: “Yeah, I suppose I am. It took a lot of work.”

Plant looks transformed by a lot of vision, and sets a tone for how to re-imagine existing buildings’ stories – and storeys. What good can they do, what feelings can they inspire, what people can they attract to invest in them and who will they bring with them?

And as leading as Hugo is, he is not quite alone in his attitude. Here in Bournemouth, for example, Ashley Nicholson and Verve Properties have sunk integrity and creativity into the tired former Debenhams by investing in the mid-to-long-term of my home town’s centre with Bobby’s. It’s attracted some forward looking businesses into its space and might have helped The Ivy move in across the Square this winter. As I asked the development manager there on a tour round Patch’s renovation of one of the floors: “Are you going to hold your nerve?” and he replied firmly: “Yes, we’re staying.”

And that’s in a context still much less clearly positive than Basingstoke’s.

To me, investing in better-feeling buildings for the longer term feels like a growing vibe.

As I discovered for another client, the ethical investments market has been projected to reach $53trillion this year by some estimations, a third of all global assets under management. And with over 936,000 B-Corporations driving more rigorously accountable future-minded business generally, like local property mates Omega RE who supported the event, plenty of signals are out there that not everyone wants to keep investing in misery.

But health is a holistic state – wellness is a combination of different positive influences at once, like the rich context of nature itself. This is as true for the design of a scheme as it is for the people who’ll move into it. Feelings have to be reflected in figures.

As Lord Mark Price shared, there is an economics to happiness.

The former John Lewis Partnership and Waitrose boss now runs a business called WorkL which helps employers: “measure and improve workplace happiness” and: “individuals to develop and be happier at work”.

“You’ve got some impressive metrics there,” I said to him, “and a whole lifetime of promoting positive experiences in the workplace. But in the current environment of leadership paralysis and supposed waning interest in ESG stuff… how do you feel about the progress? Are people wanting to invest in happiness?”

He looked incredulous for a paused second, then said: “Yes. Those figures are going up and up.”

But as Abby Foster put it: “You cannot manage what you don’t measure”.

She spoke about connecting wellbeing to performance, implying that if: “more than 70% of millennials use ESG factors to guide investment decisions” they are going to need ways to assess this.

Sharing the BREEAM standard for designing healthy developments, she effectively highlighted the basic inadequacy of how developments are usually measured. If all new construction accounted for quality of air, water, nourishment, light, movement, thermal comfort, sound, materials, mind, community… imagine our daily experiences in these structures and spaces. How we’d feel, what we might be thinking about, the work we might want to do in them.

“It just sounds really obvious,” I said to her, “everything we ever build should be measured this way.”

“The standard is out there, open source – any one can use it” she shrugged.

..Cost will be the immediate word any developer would say to that, lickety-snap. ..Actually they’d probably say viability because it sounds more technical.

But perhaps the emerging realisation for all of us is how we have been framing the costs of unhappiness. Or simply haven’t been.

The source of happiness.

Doing good never just happens. I don’t think feeling good ever just happens, there is always a context and a trigger, which was rather the point of this event, thinking about how we might encourage it.

Trust feels important to me in this. And that links directly to leadership.

If we don’t trust our supposed leaders, it usually comes back to a growing sense that they aren’t interested in us really, that they haven’t got your back. Which means they aren’t going to invest in you. Neighbourhoods reflect this as you walk through them – is the language of the materials and spaces around you suggesting trust? Does everything seem, y’know, loved?

Tidy streets and tended planting are a love language.

They are evidence of belief in the place.

This may be the central issue of our current government in the UK – they don’t seem very interested in investing in the people of Britain. Sensible as they try to sound with figures and plans, senior leadership in Westminster doesn’t sound tenacious about the things we need to feel safe, free enough to move around and try things, confident enough to be ourselves wherever we are. We don’t feel very loved. Flattery is not love, BTW Nigel Farage. It’s the billionaire asset owners that seem adored, not those feeling heart-sick because nothing in their community works well.

Here is where the real need for investment in happiness, wellbeing, resilience, regeneration is, and why it doesn’t happen enough. It’s unsexy. It’s vital, but looks less keynote-shiny than a CG-illustrated masterplan.

The hope here may be that like all advertising, more of us are feeling increasingly heart-sick and bored with keynote-shiny plans and more ready to feel a deeper connection into belonging.

To me, this felt reflected in the heart of the Invest In Happiness Summit, and it could easily not have been.

As Sîan Rebourg of The Hill Group and Deborah Williams of Sovereign Network reflected together, housing associations can help communities partner with developers to invest in places that reflect who lives there. And this must include, they said, a commitment to “maximising social value” – which has to include mechanisms to report it.

Done right, engaging with communities with really good listening, subsequent interventions are likely to be comparatively tiny in investment terms but so impactful to lives.

Their case study of Burnaby Lees is so exemplary I am going to share their slide quote about it in full:

“The Burnaby Bees gardening project aims to improve neglected green spaces outside the Burnaby shopping parade and encourage local people to learn and share gardening skills. Originally, the green spaces were unloved, overgrown, and had become a hotspot for litter and fly tipping. The land was inaccessible due to metal railings, making maintenance impossible. We secured £6,000 of funding from the Hubbub Foundation and Starbucks, through the ‘Access to Nature’ Fund, to work with the community to improve these green spaces. As a result, the space is now 1 out of 100 Nature Hubs across the UK. We have been working in partnership with BDBC and the award winning local garden designer, The Beady Gardener, to support us with delivering this project. We have received some additional funding from the Home Office, Safer Streets Fund towards the project and to further look at improving the area around Burnaby shops.”

How tiny and crafts-y and unglamorous might this sound to global venture capital manager, but what meaningful evidence of change and trust to people living in that corner of Basingstoke?

Now imagine a whole region made up of such literally grass-roots expressions. How much would they inform the shape of the bigger developments they flow around? How would this change a wider place to live?

Sîan and Debs shared the four big ambitions of the groups’ partnership and they spell out what’s needed:

• Renewed homes and streets where residents feel safe.
• A prosperous community, with strong links to a growing economy.
• A sustainable, healthy and integrated neighbourhood.
• A proud, empowered and connected community.

Proud. Empowered. A community wound together. Tell me you’re paying attention and not feeling an emotional connection to that.

In the group panel chat I hosted near the end of our time, the sense of solidarity and vision between all the speakers was an energy I could feel and hadn’t quite expected.

There was conviction between everyone on the stage – a resilient sense that there is something unstoppable about this movement.

“We won’t even have to talk about sustainability,” Marc Selligman broke in, “the benefits will speak for themselves to investors”.

I am having to pause recalling this to gather myself a bit.

Our last keynote speaker took us to perhaps where we most needed to be. From high-level positive figures at the beginning of the summit to where positivity even begins.

Vafa Taleban is an authentic leadership coach and she talks readily about helping people with big responsibilities cultivate trust. But not simply as some system of accountability. Her business is called Personal Revolution for a good reason.

Vafa’s central word I think is pretty central for me too – confidence.

Sharing an intimate testimony of personal challenges and how she worked through them to a realisation of that word, it’s led her to want to help others become leaders in their own lives, whatever their responsibilities – to: “develop resilient, conscious, and authentic leaders who are equipped to navigate the complexities of an uncertain world.”

It was a moving, human, and exactly relevant way to close the Invest In Happiness Summit.

It won’t surprise you at all that Vafa and I could hardly stop talking afterwards, all the way to my train home.

If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes emotional truth to raise a village. That’s all about the stories we tell each other and ourselves, and the spaces we are willing to keep holding for each other to do so.

You can find a report of the event from Love Basingstoke that includes everyone’s full decks right here and it’s worth a chew over as an example of how to build the components of a more positive vision.

I’ll say it’s a privilege to stand in the middle of a special event like this and be given the trust and freedom to interpret its flow and people’s testimonies a little. I felt totally at ease with how Marelize and her team had organised it and curated its purpose. I was stuck by the warmth everyone brought to each other and to her. From talking to Basingstoke & Deane’s Leader, Councillor Paul Harvey, to every one of our speakers, the atmosphere everyone brought was gently, well, joyful.

For all the buzz of being in a theatre, I think we all felt safe. Like it is perfectly possible for us to help each other picture being alright. And how to invest in it.

—-

A huge thank you to Marelize, the politicians and officers at Basingstoke & Deane Borough Council, all our heart-felt and insightful speakers and to all the developers and community champions who created such a warm welcome for us all, including me.

Do we unsee the future of gender inequality at work with one *special* day a year? International Women’s Day was a couple of weeks ago but its memory has stayed with me thanks to an event I was invited to be part of, and it’s shown me something about how to lead a new world.

How do we start the world we want?

..I mean, what do we do first?

Do we put on a costume? A stab proof vest certainly projects a worldview, for example. Do we find collaborators using code words and meet in furtive basements? Do we write some words?

It’s international poetry day as I publish this and, having been to two local events this week, collaborators, furtive basements and belief in the power of truthful words are certainly big themes in such gatherings. The sheer number of people cramming into the upper room of the Goat & Trike for Words Of Wellbeing says much about people’s need to express their feelings. And together in there, people taking their lives in their hands in front of each other, you can hear how all sorts of us are confronting structural problems.

But what about at corporate leadership events? How are we supposed to confront structural problems at work?

I think it’s got a lot to do with creating a basic sense of solidarity wherever you are. And although I am used to jumping the tonal shift between subversive art groups and establishment business lunches, I’m also getting used to seeing leadership and empathy as natural to both.

It’s just, to be any sort of ally, you do have to be ready to be caught off guard by your own bum-faced ignorance.

Leadership is empowering.

I remember after last year’s Strong Female Lead event, organiser Nella Pang shared perplexed frustrations about why so very few men had attended it. Did no-one identifying as male think there was anything to discuss or learn about the female experience?

So this year she asked me to co-host a couple of panels at it.

Now, you’d think that the boy who was asked by his teacher to join the girls’ relay team at the 1978 St Katherine’s Primary School sports day “because I know you won’t mind” wouldn’t turn a greying hair at an apparently similar request, half a century later. But after half a century, I understand that Strong Female Lead wouldn’t even have happened in 1978 without it sounding like a radical feminist protest, and that my own privilege easily blinds me to others’ experiences.

In thinking about the event beforehand, I half imagined declaring the phrase: “Settler Colonial White Supremacist Patriarchy!” from the front but picturing two different audiences reacting to it. At a leadership bash without “female” in its title, I know I would follow that phrase with a short pause and: “I may as well have just spoken to half of you like a fax machine there, or been reciting a line of HTML source code from a web page”.

But if I’d said it at this event, I’d have looked for how many knowing nods were agreeing that the same apparent technobabble sounded like a freeing medical diagnosis.

I didn’t say it. I didn’t need to. Speakers and delegates alike were simply talking about leadership. And simply demonstrating it.

To me as an artist, leadership doesn’t look like stage-hogging charisma. I have plenty of that and I know I’m no leader. It doesn’t look like a lectern in front of some flags either and it certainly doesn’t look like a slick presentation at an industry event. Plenty of people at Strong Female Lead were admitting out loud having to manage their imposter syndrome, acknowledging each other’s achievements and skills in the process – and this sounds closer to good leadership to me. I heard more than a couple of references to male gatherings wasting time with willy war waffle, always shared with an efficient roll of the eyes, and this sort of thing reassures me I’m with grown-ups too.

To me, leadership looks like holistic eldership. The leaders who have my attention are good listeners with their sleeves rolled up – I’d like to think reassuringly revealing a few tats, some stubborn paint splats and ideally even traces of potting compost under the fingernails. They’ll all know more than they want to about local bureaucratic procedures and will be efficiently attuned to neutering time-wasting bullshit. I’ve met leaders beyond counting at community creative expos. Their presence is empowering, because people feel seen by such people and such people seem to not worry much about how they are seen.

Because Nella herself is such an entrepreneur and leader, she attracts them. Valiantly going to work in the property sector, she isn’t putting on community creative expos. But in creating industry experiences to champion values and innovation, and doing so also as a woman, she encourages a naturally holistic expression of leadership, direct as she is. This event was full of honest testimonies about developing confidence as a whole person – mind, emotions and soma – all flowing as naturally as how to build comfortable teams and work around prejudices in different industries.

Whole person stuff. Not just “strategy” stuff. I felt at home.

Until my own difference suddenly showed itself in my natural use of one word, and how differently it landed for some of us.

“Speaking with passion is always a bit magnetic” I pronounced.

One of our panel guests pulled a slight wincy face.

“I’m not sure,” she said, “it’s no fun being labelled *emotional*”.

“Really?” I said with surprise but had already seen it. A male colleague can be passionate, a female colleague… well, I think there are still some unspoken Victorian echoes of the word hysterical there. I’d forgotten the structural tradition of women downplaying their emotional convictions to avoid being “too challengy”. Still, in 2025, in some situations.

Personally, I just want to hug anyone who sounds like they actually care about something. It’s the only conversations I want to spend time on – and everyone has a trigger thing for passion of some sort. But easy for me to say, confident male artist and performer.

I had a number of great conversations all day, and one of them was with a person who felt similarly to me about leading with passion. And it reminded me of the role I’m supposed to play at any event, no matter who or what gathers us.

Art is freeing.

In showing up in corporate spaces as a very slightly provocative figure of creativity, I find gender isn’t a factor. Amanda Chard and I fell into conversation early in the event but when she later appeared on our second panel, she shared with the room something of her journey through breast cancer.

She spoke diffidently but it had clearly been life changing. Yet she also easily put it into the context of her whole life – her professional development, her family, the things she cares about, including her passion for the public sector. It felt to me like everyone in the room could easily do this. I felt like I was always talking to a whole person and little would be off limits to reference or ask about.

Only afterwards did Mandy share an extra detail with me. As part of finding her way forward though treatment, she took part in a creative experience.

Mortal And Strong is a health charity founded by Dr Liz Murray. A charity looking for original ways to support people struck with serious health issues “in the prime of life”, its campaign this year is called Scars Of Gold and Mandy was featured. A beautiful series of images with an upcoming exhibition.

“Putting the spotlight on health inequalities through the power of art. A doctor led campaign bringing together 100 Voices of lived experience sharing their story of facing life changing or incurable health conditions at a young age. With a powerful photography series inspired by Kintsugi capturing the strength found in scars, and a collection of artworks inspired by the stories. Bringing together education, support and advocacy in an innovative way.”

You’ll see from the link how the work communicates. The portraits highlight the scars and pain areas of each person’s body, flipping the implication of the suffering into strength and beauty. The dignity and poise each composition bestows on its subjects utterly vanquishes any notion of the word victim.

The charity expanded the idea to a national call out for female artists and they commissioned 100 of them who were eager to respond with their own illustrations of empowerment.

This all sounded like a completely natural extension the the whole day at Strong Female Lead, but not just the talking about and reframing of personal experiences, the creative re-invention of it. I’m sure every surveyor, manager, engineer and CEO at the event would have been inspired by a whole talk on this, but I can’t imagine any of them thinking the artistic interpretation was in any way weird. They’d see it as just more leadery inspiration, I suspect.

Proud as she was of her place in, and humbly deferring to Dr Murray’s passionate leadership of Mortal And Strong, Mandy had actually shied away from sharing the work online for fear of social media censorship – those Settler Colonial White Supremacist Patriarchal algorithms absolutely freak out at breasts, even when they’re no longer there. A point depressingly up to date, as she did pluck up the courage to write a moving testimony on Linked In after our conversation and promptly had it taken down.

Just another structural cut to pick yourself up from fast.

I think we create the world we want in little spaces. Strong Female Lead felt “normal”, a room full of people behaving like people owning themselves and their senses of purpose, so much they were openly inspired by each other. And in that particular space they felt free to be themselves, no explanations necessary.

There is a need for solidarity in our human experiences. This includes leadership in general – to band together for healthier leadership, period. The sort that naturally accounts for periods, ordinary hormonal battles, life-changing experiences and the power of creatively flipping our scars into empowering symbols and stories of strength.

When we find ourselves with people who know they don’t have to have been the person going through something to own the truth of it, we’ve already made a start on realising the world we want.

—

Nella’s repost of this article is lovely and worth a minute of your time also >

And this video summation of the event really nails the vibe and value of it.

Maybe you’ve not been tracking scary political storms closely but if a life in creativity has taught me anything about anxieties, it’s that everything feels different when we’re making worlds. That, and that it also takes learning some new skills, being sure of your essential facts and an organised network of people who get it to realise whatever you’re working up. So I am developing a special climate training course for creatives.

Today is Carbon Literacy Action Day. And it's the word action I'm thinking of.

Almost a week on from the US election results and while some clever souls I know say they knew it was coming, there's no pretending it wasn't a shock to millions of us. From a certain point of view, it seemed unthinkable. Pundits may all be pulling over the bones of the Democrat campaign with desperate certainty about its failures this week but that's not what most of them were saying last week. The nauseous optimism of many left-of-MAGA has turned into simple vomiting.

The fear is suddenly real.

While others of us may be feeling our time has finally come! you and I may be wondering what air is left between the second hand and midnight on the Doomsday clock. The world waits to see what a much more organised, much more mandated, much more in control and much more openly hate-speaking President Trump will do. Only the faithful think it will be good.

The truth is, most of us had no sliver of influence anyway. So the only useful words now will be about doing. Which is the same as it ever was between you and life.

Which is why I have been developing something of my own, to help.

Getting literate.

If you’re mostly thinking about your own wellbeing right now, as a changemaker, a leader or an artist, you already know some of this, but connecting with natural environments is life saving. And, not unconnected, it could also be career saving.

As local friend Dr Isioma Nwokolo shared through her Freo page, the key to the global mental health crisis may be what’s now known as green social prescribing – helping people get past barriers to engaging with nature. Helping them comfortably try outdoor and soil-minded activities, from horticulture to conservation projects to simple exercise in nature.

She points to the findings of a government scheme that’s proved so successful, it’s been extended into spring next year. As the National Academy for Social Prescribing puts it:

“Green social prescribing can significantly reduce people's anxiety and improve their happiness and life satisfaction, according to the findings from a landmark, two-year cross-government study.” 

The findings are a ray of light in fearsome times, even if you’re not surprised by them. Happiness, purpose, love for life all up, anxiety down.

”The programme was targeted to support people who were most in need. More than 50% of participants were from the most socio-economically deprived areas, and 21% of participants were from ethnic minority populations.”

But in an anxious world supposedly surrendering to good ol’ patriarchal white supremacy and it’s fossily misinformation, another report might help you want to get your team even more literate about their job health.

The Global Green Skills report, also published recently by Linked In’s own Economic Graph, lays out hefty survey results from people across its platform.

Solitaire Townsend reposted it saying up front: “This will be my FIRST SLIDE whenever I talk to any audience: Job seekers with green skills or titles see a 54.6% higher hiring rate than the workforce overall. In the US this rises to 80.3% higher.”

The business case for sustainable futures may sound dry, the moral case for such impossible seeming work just overwhelming. But the career case for tooling up your sustainability qualifications might unlock some personal energy around it.

As one of the report’s headlines puts it: “Across industries, green talent rises to the top of the pool.”

And there is nowhere near enough talent capable of taking those jobs yet.

Can you hear that? The possibilities calling.

Whether a lot of US funding for such skills may be about to disappear, the problems they’re addressing are not, and neither are all the leaders so invested in it. Championing the planet is a global movement, not a political party campaign.

There is a lot of work to be done unlocking access to this for people, to get way more diverse experiences into our responses to change – so fewer and fewer of us are *shocked* at cultural turn-ups, for example. But imagine if, as part of the greening of our workforce, we tooled up our very creative abilities as well.

This is why I am developing a carbon literacy course for creatives. To help us get the science straight, but placed in the context of what we do for a living – create new ways of seeing.

Creative Climate Confidence.

Creative confidence is what I’ve learned to bring to situations, I’m comfortable saying. It’s the shot in the arm I’m always offering leaders and changemakers and even fellow creatives – I often leave people seeing things differently and feeling the possibilities. Qualified by years of artistic practices.

So I want to help those of us already doing some of that practicing find our confidence to speak up about the crisis in nature, by understanding it with a bit more clarity and courage.

I got CL certified personally earlier in the year and I did so because I began to resist my initial reaction to the idea that the climate emergency is all about carbon. It most certainly isn’t, and getting caught up about numbers sounds like more of the meep-moop techbro thinking and academic distance from reality that got us into this mess. But I started to feel that this is, therefore, a culturally fair way into facing the facts and I wanted to know how the Project framed it.

As a spiritual guide or reader of runes, you might say: “Ah, the *science*…” and wonder if Carbon Literacy isn’t more of the robot system talking to the robot system. But in the Momo course taking shape I start by addressing this – how do we know what we think we know about a changing climate and what causes it? Who holds the data, where did they get it, and what really is the consensus?

If everyone in leadership is supposedly referencing the same knowledge sets around the world, even if to counter-culture it, better to know what that is. From there, we can build on the essential skills we creatives practice every day that I think are essential and largely missing from everyone’s shared knowledge – bringing to life alternative songs and stories of us. That can serve way more of us.

As leonardo.zangrando commented under my Insta post poem next to the Unsee The Future logo:

”Hold the tension between current and desired reality. Choose the desired reality. Creativity will fill the gap.”

It’s a way to apply new green skills with more cognitive diversity, something business think tanks like the sound of right now.

But it’s the wellbeing imperative that means Understanding Media is still only second on my reading list. I am currently sitting with Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How funghi make our worlds, change our minds, and shape our futures and it seems an even more pertinent and soothing perspective changer.

Where does my biome end and the rest of nature begin?

The world is way bigger than we think, full of many worlds beyond our understanding – but we are living parts of it. And in that lies the essential life force of any visionary response – creation.

Let’s unreal the fear by taking some confident action – and upskilling for the vision seems an empowering next step.

For these are our times, and they’re waiting for us to realise.

If you’re interested as an agency leader, an arts org manager or a practicing creative to know more about Creative Climate Confidence: Carbon Literacy training from Momo, DM me and I’ll pop you on the contact list for when it’s been approved.

Additional testimo: Some personal reactions.

It struck me anew that Trump is like Covid. Not simply that he seems like an escaped lab experiment that makes lots of us feel like death and separates us from our loved ones and takes forever to get out of our system. But in his reflection of where we are – is he, at this stage, still just an exaggeration of all the massive structural problems we already had? We the people manifested his like around the world. If you’re a lost-feeling liberal, you can see clearly that he isn’t a saviour to overthrow an unjust system but its most truthful product, and that’s what’s making your teeth explode at night.

But in any subset of us, there are vibrations that some of us pick up that others don’t.

In my shock that morning, numb like 2016's Brexit referendum result, I felt doubly liberally ignorant. I thought I'd been listening and learning this time.

How apparently little I still understand about how far and for how long working class opportunities have been sold down the river by people talking about liberal democracy. I am still – still – trying to wake up.

What are the emotional truths that lead us into recognition, then fandom and then deep into culty worship, surrendering our very identity? And what, too, are the mechanisms? If you think a lot of Americans need to ask this of their MAGA dads and brothers, you need to ask it of yourself too.

Where do you end and does your culture begin?

Trump is a shibboleth, an undisguisable tell of where you’re really coming from. In this cultural moment, it divides us sharply.

About the mechanics of all this, the most useful book any of us can read right now might be Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The extensions of man, which I HAVE moved to the next on my rollneck-intellectual content pile; the president elect even spelled it out himself, between the spelling out of everything else he’d like to do: “You are the media now!” I don’t know how my good mate Mark Masters feels about this after all the business community work he’s done under this banner.

But *More Analysis!* is only more of the same and not what your nervous tension headache needs. We need to find things to do. Like we always did.

The first tingle of response I felt by midday that day was what I posted across my channels then:

Creativity will come.

It's at the heart of my thinking. Making new stuff takes you out of the fear and into a new world, by making one. Art’s essential life force – creation.

But to really world, and build one in the face of violent opposition, we're going to need to be a lot more confidently creative and a lot more ORGANISED.

And that means knowledge and networks.

And a clear idea of what, from all the uncertainty, is most certainly still coming.

There, as ever, lie the opportunities.

The single most challenged resource for any leader is usually time – but effective work rarely falls out of reactive panic. So, for the frazzled Corporate Marketing Officer, is a truly invaluable creative critical friend someone who helps you hold space to think straight – and bring the best out of you? My brilliant chat with Ed from Carswell Gould on the new UnEdited Marketing Podcast, while philosophical, was rooted in our collective “two hundred years of experience” influencing the shape of things in the supposedly *real* world.

Creative director Ed Gould and I have had some excellent chats in his car.

We had another one on the way to recording this one, and it’s an insight into how we both use our creative confidence and experience to make sense of practical biz challenges for clients. There’s a lot in here, and it’s at the business end of my creative life over so many years. But working with Ed has helped me think in real world applications even more – he’s a realist, and I’ve watched him get to the heart of a problem or the implications of a solution in seconds. Even while sometimes deploying UN ambassador-level diplomatic efforts to land the right strategic storytelling. He’s among the best of the creative director mates I’ve made and learned invaluable examples from.

Here we chat about what it’s like to bring the art bit of you to work, how we’ve nurtured relationships with trust in the heat of deadlines, and what it means to make a real difference to a team’s expectations. Somewhere in all this we also came up with the term Corporate Devolution and I think we should all go away and explore what that could mean for our economically failing times.

This episode of The UnEDited Marketing Podcast isn’t officially out until November 4, so as a Momo amigo you’re getting an exclusive, you lucky poppet. Hope it inspires your own creativity – for it belongs absolutely in the *real* world. This is how we make it.

A huge thanks to Ed for the invitation to share some insights into our always excellent conversations.

Whether you’re tasked with leading or you’re just trying to survive, the world in your head and the one all around you might be a privately difficult place to be at the moment – but that’s exactly why little encounters of unexpected creativity can cut through, changing the moment you find yourself in. Outdoor art experiences, like Arts By The Sea festival, can help us feel suddenly seen.

Distance. We learned a new perspective on it four years ago together, by being so not together. I watched my friends all across events and venues spaces face the end of their living during the pandemic, in every sense. That we are four and a half years past the global outbreak of Covid 19 already is just another weird timey-wimey head trip of our impossible feeling times.

But distance and even connection sound a bit impersonal as problems go, don’t they? Sort of demotivating when you say them. Like community funding or any crime statistics.

What if we instead talked about flavours?

What flavours of life do you enjoy? Which are missing? What makes you feel like trying a few new ones? After all, when we were toddlers we navigated the world mostly by tongue.

If you’re on an emotional front line right now, I want to say this isn’t whimsical time-wasting, it’s likely even more relevant to you. Because you need this, mate. We all need this.

Is this why everyone seemed to leave the Poetry Takeaway weeping?

I wept at someone else’s poem.

The theme of this year’s Arts By The Sea festival was Taste, and it was designed to deliberately contrast some different flavours.

As a board member for the festival over the last year or so, I have nothing to do with the programming or running of it, but I do get to join other much more qualified minds than me in supporting and listening to the core team working miracles to realise it every year, Festival Director Andrea Francis, along with Leigh Hayler, Nuala Clarke and Creative Director Tor Byrnes. The simple idea of Arts By The Sea in Bournemouth town centre is to be as open an experience as possible.

There it all is in the public realm, outdoors, no ticket prices for anything, and there you are just wandering past when you can’t help stopping to wonder why some performers with different learning abilities seem to be enacting a Terry Gilliam film in front of the Wetherspoons.

That Hijinx’s piece with Ramshacklicious Truth! made me cry with laughter right there on the street but moves me close to tears again now at the thought of it is just one example. It connected me to the players, the sensory physicality of their storytelling and a different glimpse of their worldview. And it connected me to my father, who I could picture reacting exactly like me to their show. It was delightful; his heart would have been as full as mine, laughing and weeping. It had been a while since I felt memory of my Dad like that.

Most of us don’t talk about “needing art”. But then we see a burger van handing out personally written poems to a long queue of passers by and we find ourselves joining the queue and leaving half an hour later in tears feeling seen. Feeling a tiny turning point of something.

I can tell you that’s just art, in the hands of well practiced artists. Connecting you back to yourself and your aliveness in our trudging and frightening world.

That teams of poets were hand-scribing for people for two days straight in that burger van, like an emotional gig economy, only shows how practical and practiced is the business of reflecting emotional truth, even when every writer there had to combine creative flare with empathy and intuition and talent and soul and a sense of community service like priests running a soup kitchen or recovery hostel. Like overlooked legends.

The Poetry Takeaway should be prescribed on the NHS, of course. I’ve said it before about poetry evenings generally, half a dozen of which were represented at the festival in various ways. We need experiences to testify and figure out our inner life out loud. To truly live wherever we find ourselves, we need to feel more connected to ourselves there as much as with any found family. Holding safe spaces and making regular opportunities to do this is generational work that makes where we live a real place in everyone’s mind. A real home.

Only sometimes does art have to actually set fire to it.

Gateway experiences.

Thankyou, yesterday – hello, tomorrow.

I wrote it on the inside of one of the Honey Pot’s honeycomb hexagon panels. Not sure why I had the instinct to, exactly, but Arts By The Sea always heralds the proper start of autumn to me, which is my favourite time of year – the time of change. Ordinarily in the diurnal rhythm a back to school, new pencil cases and a fresh ventures mindset season, after the slow-downs of summer.

Impermanence can be joyful, not just about grief. And creative director Tor Byrnes said as much to me in a little interview recorded for Hope FM last week.

“We want to offer people lots of different tasters of things at the festival,” she said. “Some people like their art to be political, some like it to just be playful. We have a real range of experiences to compare and have a go with.”

“Like the festival is a gateway drug to art” I think I might have said. It sounds like something I might have said.

The Honey Pot was Pyrite Creative’s response to a co-commission by Shambala festival, a five meter bowl structure formed with honeycomb panels designed to exist just for the days of the event before being set alight in the night, taking people’s sweet memories with it, scribbled onto the inside of the panels. Forecast gale force winds on the Sunday forced the team to reschedule the torchlight parade and firework send-off of The Honey Pot to the Saturday night, but it still attracted a beach front full of people after a day of wonderfully playful happenings all over Bournemouth’s ornamental Lower Gardens and Pier Approach and Square. As I said last year, leadership of all possible kinds should at some point sit at the feet of those creating outdoor arts events; you might arrive a girl and leave a woman.

Staring into flames at the start of a new season is a momentarily solitary experience, even surrounded by a chattering throng. So, what about when we don’t feel included or reflected in an event? Even with the most inclusive of spirits, your own private moment at a festival might have you slipping out of shared time, everyone else seeming to be connecting with the fun, perhaps you’ve found yourself wandering around a public gathering feeling your own need for connection in an ironically stronger way. But this is as much a feeling we all understand as whooping at a giant street bubble show. It is so often the very creators of events themselves who can feel the least caught up in the experience they’re making and defending against weather and politics. The artistic instinct to have made it and become the person on the other side of making it is partly why they endure, I think.

I always feel joyful at what my friends turn our town into every year. They show it at its best, at its most possible. This year, that spirit of taste, putting together our different tastes as Tor so envisioned it, seemed even more intentional than ever, and seeing the spread of flavours from so many local artists woven into every corner of the programme was inspiring.

But if you find yourself in a public moment, that’s meant to be inclusive, trying to wrestle the sad fortune of feeling out of place in it with whatever self possession you can muster, this could be an experience trying to make your own creative expressions find a new home. It might even be the very event you don’t feel at home in this time, for it will be a different event next time, or maybe it’s about using the sting to make a whole new something.

You’ll have heard art’s call, if so, and I can only wish you all the flow in the world. Like every leader and artist and volunteer and visitor who could get involved with Arts By The Sea this year, you might be helping someone else feel seen later on. Or holding the door into a new season for them.

Or maybe just helping them taste something altogether new, just when they need it.

Explore all the work, artists and community events of Arts By The Sea right here >

Four years ago, I was commissioned by Arts By The Sea festival to devise a lockdown podcast, and it’s still one of my favourite pieces of work. One of these guests is now the creative director of the festival, another hosted the main stage this year, I walked to the launch chatting to another and all of them are still making marks and events and experiences all over the place they love to call home as artists. Between their testimonies, they paint a gently wonderful picture of Bournemouth and why they live and work here.

Catch up with all eight episodes of Talking Distance right here:

Lorna Rees

Natasha Player

Peter John Cooper

George Okoye

Michele O’Brien

Tor Da Force

Ricky Also

Nawar Saadi

Leadership and wellbeing might sound like mutually exclusive terms if you’re chest deep in responsibility right now, but you’ll also be well aware of the mental and physical health demands on those around you. At an event with surgeons, leaders and students from University Hospitals Dorset with Bournemouth University last week, I suggested that there might be a way to boost everyone’s sense of wellbeing while also getting them to help you do your impossible job – engaging with the future.

I was standing in front of the word SCIENCE. It sat solidly with a no-nonsense full stop across a big screen behind me.

“It all sounds rather comforting, doesn’t it?” I said to the auditorium, “Data and accountability and metrics. Sort of certain.” 

I turned, as if appraising the word. Then leapt into prowling the stage floor as I turned back, eyeing everyone. I channel nothing if not Victorian Music Hall sometimes, honestly. Or maybe Royal Society lectures, which is the exact same thing.

“And it’s how leaders make plans, isn’t it?” I added, “you can bank on numbers and evidence and graphs of predictable behaviours.”

I was out at the BU campus, rounding off a day conference that the uni had organised with University Hospitals Dorset, the big NHS foundation trust running all our local services. Their first Leadership Event in some years had brought together heads from the two institutions with guests and speakers considering different aspects of leadership issues that are confronting… well, everyone foolhardily attempting to run something at the moment. But especially those on the front line of healthcare and the wheezing NHS. 

All plus me. To wrap up a Friday afternoon with a hard handbrake turn in tone. But we were, after all, in a theatre.

“There’s always something else in play, though, isn’t there?” I continued after a portentous pause, “– truth. Human emotional truth. We all come to work in a context” I said quietly. “..And I hear there are some slightly massive issues spinning up together out there globally – that you bet we are all bringing to work with us.”

I still had the word SCIENCE across the screen over my head.

“So I’m going to suggest another word that I have to refer to every day in my work. And, when I bring it up, I think you’ll agree it’ll seem hyper relevant.”

I flipped the slide behind me.

“Art.” 

I twinkled at everyone. Obviously.

“Walk with me” I said.

I think there were two sniggers.

The World Health Organisation launched a new Lancet Global Series last September, on the back of a report in 2019 – What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being?

The report itself suggested there was a “growing evidence base” demonstrating how artistic practices can help all kinds of health issues, from child development and the encouragement of everyone’s better wellbeing habits, to the improvement of care, treatment and mental health management. Stuff you might say duh to but for which there isn’t enough consistency of awareness in comfortingly clinical sounding, sciency, medical terms across WHO member states, according to its authors Daisy Fancourt and Saoirse Finn. 

Y’know. In other words, saying it in serious, technical language that gets things taken much more seriously. Like you always manage to.

The report casually refers to “artistic interventions” and I think we should certainly explore whatever that means very seriously. I did also smirk at the writers declaring that, for the purposes of the scope, they didn’t consider architecture to be “art”. Nor gardening. They’ve obviously never been to Chelsea Flower Show.

In commissioning a new focus on this with Jameel Arts & Health Lab, Chief Scientist at the WHO, Sir Jeremy Farrar, said: "For too long we have seen Science and the Arts as separate endeavours. But these silos were not always so. Through much of human history, the creative interface of different disciplines has been a catalyst for both innovation and healing.”

“The arts must be seen as both central to the human experience and important in the maintenance of good health” as Dr Miriam Lewis Sabin, North American Executive Editor of The Lancet put it.

Well, shee. No kidding.

To my audience of people holding lives in their hands for a living with mind-bulging technical knowledges, I started by saying that I could talk to them all about how much older art simply is than we’re used to thinking of it being – maybe even ten times older than the first homo sapiens. The need to make sense of ourselves in the world is primal, and so fantastically ancient.

I suggested too that I could talk about how art does stuff to your brain – like speaker-listener neural pairing, for example. Cognitive coupling when telling a ripping yarn, shown up by fMRI scans, as Greg J. Stephens, Lauren J. Silbert, and Uri Hasson demonstrated nearly fifteen years ago. As Harvard boffin Carmine Gallo puts it, our brains are wired for storytelling. 

Instead of podium countdowns, imagine if we had live brain scans of an auditorium audience during a corporate slide show.

I did also skip through the headlines of Why Science is a bit like Art, without me using five terms for Leonardo Da Vinci as I did in my film.

But really, if you want to talk about wellness in times of crisis, I’ll bring you back to that idea of art not being anything separate from the rest of our lives. If we all had some idea of its practices and what they do for us, we’d be changing worlds every day.

As Rebecca Wragg-Sykes put it, behind me on the screen, it’s another weirdness of modern life to separate “work and play, the sacred from the mundane – I don’t think most of humanity has lived like that” she says.

There’s more to storytelling than learning some good tricks to help your bullet points land clearly. Humans naturally need frequent safe space to take their imaginations aside from supposed reality and wonder what if.

Creativity and tenacity

It struck me, sitting through the whole day and chatting with some of the attendees, how prominent were the themes of culture and community. These guys know the emotional truth of trying to lead. But it’s hard to connect people to possibilities when there’s so much crisis and decline to be managing. Like… SO much. This was the end of the working week before Lord Darzi’s independent investigation was expected to declare the NHS in “a critical condition” when published the following Monday.

All that along with so many increasingly wild stories across the wider media background to our lives. Wildfires and genocides and apocalyptic grifters.

I was actually in the room to join Paul Chandler, Head of Net Zero Travel and Transport, Greener NHS to share a couple of perspectives between us on sustainability. If our institutional responses to all the crises of climate breakdown is how everyone’s leadership will ultimately be judged, still most of us are asking… how the hell DO we engage with that? And help our people to?

Paul began by bringing some detailed evidence and implications around air quality; a technical way in for a room full of problem solvers. I then brought us all back to the more fundamental issue I’ll always suggest we’re facing. 

Storytelling.

“Confidence.” I declared. “How do you develop it as a leader? I’ve learned through the practices of art that you learn to make more confident marks through practice, and that’s the sort of confidence leaders need to be inspiring in others” I said, with the confidence of someone who hasn’t ever had to sack someone or cancel their surgery. 

It takes courage to step into a new behaviour for the first time. To face change and try responding to it. But if there’s one thing that stokes courage it’s vision. And you already know where that comes from. A natural passion. 

What do you already personally care about? What would it mean to plug that in?”

It was at this point I brought up a slide with a striking image in it, a still from a short film by Maria Koijck. In it she is splayed out in a surgical gown like Da Vinci’s own Vitruvian patient, surrounded by all the material cost of putting her through life-saving cancer operations.

“I know most of you will have seen this. But this,” I said, “is art”. Not realising Maria Koijck is an artist and so could be said to be cheating here.

“It’s personal testimony, movingly so – it has immediate emotional impact, even just as a still image. And it changes the way you see the world. When an idea strikes you somewhere deep, somewhere that connects to your emotional truth, that’s motivational. It’s conviction energy to change the world – at least your own. And this, just so you know, is thinking like an artist.”

It’s here that I must pull back the curtain of my Royal Society gothic improv to reveal my source. Because not only did UHD’s head of sustainability Stuart Lane get me this gig, he fed me gold for the show. Not just Maria’s amazing film, but a real life example even more inspiring. Surgeon Jo Higgins.

I called out to her in the audience. She stood up at the very back.

“Tell us about the Hand Hub” I asked.

As she put it in an article about it: “Prior to the ‘Higgins Hub’, we carried out around 100 hands theatre cases every year in our main hospital theatres under a general anaesthetic. Now we can carry out these procedures in a more accessible space, using local anaesthetic, which means patients don’t need to be ‘starved’, there is no need to stay in hospital and it reduces the risks of general anaesthetic. It is better for the environment too, as we limit waste, are not using anaesthetic gases and have reduced our carbon footprint.”

Sounds simple, right? Transform the waste and effort of doing everything under general into all kinds of more efficient at once by doing lots of procedures under local anaesthetic. Think to change what theatre means in a given context. But change don’t come easy.

“I felt like I was banging my head against a wall for two years” she admitted in the room. “Just trying to get agreements to do something differently, it’s… slow.”

“You felt like giving up at one point, right?” I said. “And so there you were, sitting at your kitchen table vowing to forget it and >bing-bong!< the doorbell goes and its a courier at the door holding… what?”

“A tenacity award” she replied sheepishly. The room erupted.

“I didn’t feel I could give up then” she said flatly.

One thing I’ve observed since I more closely began to look at everything through the lens of art and storytelling is that emotional truth tends to resonate like something obvious. Like a new tune that sounds familiar – “didn’t someone already do that?” I used to worry about this until I got comfortable with being able to write a good tune. Jo’s new clinic is like this – so smart, it seems natural.

A widely shared and little tapped emotional truth of now is that people would love to do something about the climate crisis. Feel like they were making a difference. Our corporate storytellers may reflexively major on the race riots and corruptions, like amputated frogs legs twitching with electro shocks, but all over the UK are communities coming out to defend each other, stand up for refugees, tend allotments, raise money endlessly for underfunded treatment units, gather in fields with umbrellas to demonstrate for solar farms.

Millions of us want to do something positive. Sustainability just sounds impossible to approach.

But here’s the thing. All those examples above, of people getting on and responding, they demonstrate that principle of art – embodiment. Learning by doing, which is really growing by doing. Trying stuff changes you. I’ve found that the practices of “sustainability” have the same sort of health effects as doing art – when you find a way into it with something you find yourself caring about naturally. 

Getting into it feels like you’re helping to manifest the freaking future.

Right now, take it from a storyteller, this is the story to weave through everything as a leader. Because it brings together everything your leadership will be judged on in the end – how well you prepared everyone for change. Practice embodying it.

I want to say to anyone carrying a heavy load of responsibility right now – forget trying to project authority. Inspire people with the confidence of your vision. If it’s a vision naturally tapping into the emotional truth of lots of people around you, your job will be to simply open the ways for them to help you build it.

After all, theatre is the safe space we hold to do business.

——

Thanks to Stuart Lane and Richard Renaut for the invitation in to join everyone on the day – a privilege to listen in and meet everyone. And to Siobhan Harrington: CEO University Hospitals Dorset and Prof. Lois Farquharson for their warm welcome.

Wendy Korthuis-Smith, Executive Director Virginia Mason Institute, shared a lot of evidence of how her very large health foundation in the US had coped with institutional reform to improve patient outcomes and wellbeing. Professor Habib Naqvi, MBE: Director of NHS Race and Health Observatory, had some soberingly simple graphs in his talk showing the racial proportions of London’s NHS services, from the bottom through the inverse slides of those proportions through the pay grades to the top. Not a flicker of surprise will you give to this, but it was still striking to stare at on a screen the width of the auditorium.

Ajay Chowdhury was handed the post-lunch funk slot and filled it admirably with a solid dial around the scope of AI’s implications right now. A novelist, Chair of Cambridge Enterprise and Senior Advisor at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), he’s co-founded Shazam back in the day, so he knows a thing or two about technology, business and storytelling. The general ooh and ahh of LLM text-prompted deepfakes might have done nothing for allaying everyone’s background sense of future dread or maybe just colossal institutional weariness, but it talk-prompted lots of geeky interest from the assembled medical engineers.

All a great set-up for me to step into and slip a different lens over to finish with. Thankyou.

—

*If you consider Leonardo DaVinci a half decent artist, it’s worth noting that the Roman bloke he honoured with an excellent sketch, Vitruvius, was an architect. I don’t wanna get in amongst it.

Downright frightening. Can I even feel the half of it? While I can easily talk about *The Future!* violent race-related riots across England this week felt like an attempt to drag the UK into the past, an idea of England with fewer voices in it. But in a similar spirit to a festival I co-hosted last weekend, joyfully defiant community responses all over the country have demonstrated something to take note of – what a new spirit of looking forward might potentially mean to way more of us. Especially when we start to see that none of us have the last word on oppression.

I don’t claim to be a trend forecaster. And, regrettably, I’m not sure I’m a brilliant science fiction visionary either. I didn’t spend the 1980s frustrated I was just a bit too early for an international computer network to help me secretly ace my exams, and thirty years later I was gobsmacked it produced Brexit. 

Didn’t have a Scooby that was coming. To me, 2016 felt like waking up in Invasion of the body snatchers.

So I may have had to retroactively adjust the blinkers of my intersectional privilege a tad, but a life in creativity wasn’t all private viewings and fashion parties and sparing me the need for brilliant exam results. In time it has given me a slightly different take on leadership – I instinctively observe that with storytelling. 

How well a leader uses the theatre of making ideas land, certainly; think of your audience, by slide 48, Gary. But also, by how well they seem to tap into emotional truth.

How far can a shared moment get us?

I’ve been suggesting over the last couple of years that leaders need to start using the f-word. It’s partly how I pitch my place in change-making events; my creative confidence can help leaders “talk about the future again”. This means more than managing trend and risk analyses, it’s something that takes that nerve-wracking thing. Vision. 

Perhaps partly as a result, it’s a word that’s seemed tacitly banned for the past couple of decades. But global leaders have been clearly reading my posts at last. 

First time I heard it recently it rang out like a bell. It was congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a rally at Climate Week in New York last September and she used it in just the sort of context I feel the need for its revival – a passionate call for justice from leadership, effectively. To start investing in futures more of us can believe in again. Work for together again.

This past couple of weeks, Vice President Kamala Harris has been using it. “It’s a fight for our future” she said in her very first address as Democrat almost-nominee, using the general singular that futurists twitch at. “It’s about two different Americas,” she said, “one that looks back and one that looks forward.”

I blinked at it. 

Her new running mate, Tim Walz, has been coming out with it. “Together we will fight for our future.” You’ve heard him.

And… is it me? Does some vague sense of future, of possibilities, seem part of something just beginning to resonate with more of us?

“They galvanised a feeling of hope, engaged with Americans, acted with purpose and invigorated online conversations” said Rakia Reynolds this week. “As a society, we’ve been doomscrolling and trash-talking for so long that a positivity pipeline was welcomed with open arms—and maybe even an iota of trust.”

Writing in AdWeek, she is one of many commentators already analysing the Harris campaign for storytelling gold and I can see it unexpectedly feels to some of us like the Democrat candidate is tapping into a seam of emotional truth about change itself in this moment. Something new. She does, after all, seem to embody it. On the surface.

Fear of change you might say is a significant theme of the last ten years. It is how political populism stokes isolating frustrations into fires in people’s shop units and high streets. Violence below the surface given legitimacy and outlet. But it can be a fearsome porn addiction online – an itch in the pants stoked into gut flames in the unreal single-bandwidth sensorial experience of eyes on a screen. 

We can amplify it in ourselves, all alone in our rooms. Silently teaching the algorithm how we want to see the world.

You’ll say it sounds like we should get out a bit more.

But, if so, where would we go?

Practicing the world we want.

Business rarely gets the luxury of being populist. Global economics tacitly demands business looks forward relentlessly for one thing – “growth”. Plus, workplace representation has at least developed enough that open sexism and racism aren’t supposed to be listed as package features in recruitment ads. I’ve yet to see any Stop The Boats memes sponsored by electrical engineering firms in the midlands on Linked In.

So, in generally liberal times, one event I’ve been involved with on the surface for five years wouldn’t sound controversial at all in a pitch to corporate or arts or local authority public facing funding. Back when we imagined there was any funding just for fun.

World Of Love Festival.

I think founder Bea Sieradzka’s vision for it began with simply wanting to encourage people to learn different languages and it evidently grew into a whole weekend celebration of diversity, over in my extended back garden of Kings Park in Boscombe. I can amble there with a coffee.

It’s a gently fun showcase of people living in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole linked loosely into communities with shared roots all around the world. It looks like a gathering of gazebos and parades and performances of traditional voices, stories, colours, flavours, aromas and beats all in one field across from the Cherries’ stadium. My duties as host of the main stage you may feel free to assume give me an extra hit of whatever it is that liberal white dudes get a little extra smug on at Protected Characteristic community fairs. Because, despite my furtive protestations to Bea every year that she can’t have a middle aged monolinguistic English white bloke ring mastering a racial diversity event, I’ve still done it. Bea scolds me for saying so each time, but having radio host and BCP Indian Community leader Anjali Mavi co-present with me definitely improves the show, I feel more part of the story. She’s a pro and a laugh to banter with between acts and only occasionally forgets I don’t speak Bengali, which is lovely. Plus, if it is an initiative to quietly help the still majority white population of my home towns feel comfortable with who their towns also are today, my damn-fool face in there has just part of it up to now. I don’t feel needed, I do feel welcome.

And somehow, every year it all turns into balmy late afternoon sunshine in that little field of love, like a family cook-out. Simple, heart-calming, engaging for those just wandering in to attend and grab a bite with the kids.

It’s quirky, energising, juxtaposial, funny and sweet and moving and I don’t know the half of it, obviously.

Bea’s post from a couple of days after the event sums up a lot with some honesty.

“Someone wrote to us today, “I have attended numerous festivals but never encountered one like yours, where multicultural ethnicities come together and seamlessly flow throughout the event.” The reality is that achieving this seamless flow isn't always as easy as we’d like it to be. We all bring our own emotions and experiences, which can make navigating differences challenging. But it’s precisely through these challenges that we find the essence of what we aim for: uniting people and blending diverse cultures into the world we live in. 

“Our festival is about more than just celebrating differences; it’s about integrating those differences into our shared experience, enriched by the British values of inclusivity, unity, and respect for one another. It’s not always easy. But it’s great if we can keep trying.”

It’s great if we can keep trying. There is a realistic note.

We never know the back stories. I walked to that field this year thinking it again. What might a young rapper from South Sudan, not much older than the civil war that began in 2013, be bringing with them into their music, between Bentui and Boscombe? A hymn to his mother that he will be okay? TR Craze’s new single might be bobbing Afro pop, but My House On Fire is clearly testifying to a long personal journey. And, as Caroline said to me, it’s sort of weird to dance to such a testimony.

I get to bring some silly joyfulness, as my privilege would always seem to suggest and my job always requires a bit. It may be easy for an old liberal to enjoy a mix of voices, flavours and sounds on a warm summer afternoon, it’s like a world’s fair, a UN shop window. But I know enough when I’m welcoming people onto the stage. And not just about what it takes to bring people together across languages and cultures and still current divides of conflict represented around that field in Boscombe.

But this year’s festival also fell on a weekend of far right mobilisation across the UK.

I can say that I knew up front there had been warnings from the police. They had, in fact, talked Bea through the details of what to do if anyone showed up, and that they would be on standby to swiftly attend. A security person told me later that afternoon they had backup on speed dial also. I heard insider testimony from a community support professional of being targeted that morning on email by a far-right group. 

I found myself watching the perimeter from the stage for much of the day. And much of the day seemed to pass slowly, even with all the beats and dancing and irrepressible fun.

Bea had shared just a glimpse of this up front with me, not wishing to twist my joyful role but making sure I had an idea. She said: “I let you know because I trust you will know just what to say and do.”

That’s a lot of faith in my potentially front line diplomatic capabilities.

But I wondered, what would I do with that mic, if bully boys strode past our extremely porous perimeter?

One phrase kept coming to mind.

We’re not going back.

Neglecting the connections.

What holds us together?

Netflix and sugar, mostly, right?

But what would make your nearest high street feel like home? What signals stimulate the idea of who we are together? It’s a story, right? But what makes us feel it like it makes up part of who we are?

The ideas of where we’ve come from, the ideas of where we’re heading?

The Past is no more real than The Future. They’re made of the same fuzzy grey memory mood brain goop. So we should be vigilant to how the media amplifies our perception of all this – the vibration of it into us. 

The absolute certainty of a MAGA Republican dictatorship can switch to the overnight liberal bejazzlement of Joe Biden finally stepping aside for Kamala Harris. A more socially minded new government in the UK can flip back into a stomach pit-drop of race riot violence on streets across England. It’s a head spin. A roulette wheel you’ve bet your mental health on. All on black. Now all on red. 

If you’re paying it all attention. The broadcast edits of reality.

I’ve found this week that, not unlike my own reaction to Brexit in 2016, trying to understand it and biting back my fear and anger with respect, it is posts on Facebook from people I think well of and normally like very much that scare me. The body snatchers virus had barely begun its work eight years ago, I might be tempted to think by the same medium.

But I at least know a bit more now. I know it’s not that. I am disturbed that certain friends of mine seem to not have a Scooby about the effect of their posts about boats and Farage and *wokeism!* on other friends of mine. I do know now that a generation of slidingly right wing Conservatism in England has made a country so unequal it is culturally coming apart as a society in our minds, supposedly spilling onto our streets. That will intersect for some of us. But whose voices we’re surrounding ourselves with – there’s the real centre of influence we choose to sit in the middle of.

As Dame Sara Khan says in the intro to her report into social cohesion, published in April:

“Rather than high risk and acute threats such as terrorism, cyber-security and foreign state interference, many of the cohesion risks I identify are chronic, insidious and often sit below the radar; the impact of which is not actively measured or even fully appreciated. There is a growing and dangerous climate of threatening and intimidatory harassment leading to serious censorship – what I have termed freedom-restricting harassment – affecting not just our politicians and those in public life, but members of the public too.”

Her criticism of politicians helping to make this happen from the top down, has bordered on exasperation.

The speeches, the references, the terminology sewn into statement after statement from Conservative ministers since long before Brexit. The near-naked incitement to racial hatred on front page after front page across our newstands nationwide. We know whose skin the structural storytelling industry has in the game. And when any white friends share memes about “concerned fathers #notfarright” they’re showing how stomach-turningly easy it is for them and me to not even notice how othering our self expressions can be. How little it costs us to give a neighbour yet another little stab cut of dismissal.

“One of the hardest things is, coming from a muslim background, it’s horrible to hear the monstering of people, it’s ludicrous – of course it gets to you” said journalist and podcast host Coco Khan this week. “In the 90s we were all just Asian” she said.

“The power structures have been working efficiently I would say since 9/11 to create distinctions between us.”

Historian David Olusoga is unequivocal in this point.

“Riots are not protests and there is a difference between motivations and excuses. Despite much that has been said, the riots of 2024 were not born of “legitimate grievances” about poverty, underinvestment and the breakdown of basic services, all supposedly deepened by mass immigration” he said. “The people attacked on the streets, those who had to defend their places of worship or their homes, are the neighbours of the rioters. They live in the same towns and suffer the consequences of the exact same poverty and underinvestment.”

Novara Media recorded a take-down of this behaviour that will sound like an inrush of oxygen to some of us, from a young white woman in Barnsley, who said: ““Your problems are from the top-down people making us feel small because we’re working class. But I’m proud to be working class, and I’m proud to be anti-racist working class as well.”

Which doesn’t do justice to the detention lesson plan this whole clip was. As the first comment under it on Insta said: “This woman has come into the bar I work at a few times and she absolutely schooled one of our regulars (a very middle class Reform voter btw) she is CLASS and she sinks pints like a champ ❤️”

“You have to make adjustments, of course you do,” said Danny, a doorman calling into Shelagh Fogarty’s LBC radio show from somewhere in London. “I know what I look like, I look like a doorman… and when I walk down the street and see a group of Asian women looking a bit nervous because of the way I look I deliberately give them a nice big smile.”

“I have culture, I have colour, I’ve learned things from around the world – they’ve enriched my life. If you live in my community, you are my people”.

If you live in my community, you are my people.

God I want to have a pint where these people are drinking. Don’t you?

This amorphous concept we call “society” has always been a judgement word – are you in or out of it? Do you wish you were accepted by whatever it is in your head, or do you know it’s bullshit? Do you still believe in citizens and scroungers? The high street is a minefield.

You might simply ask why would so many of us want to set our own house on fire? Or at least our bins. I know I’m always giving myself away when I talk about futures. Is there a more entitled tell about personal privilege?

You can say so. But we’ll still have to live together and manage our emotional truths as well as our bins. The fact that some of us still think it’s a mystery how others of us can feel as Sudanese as British is, I can see enough, a failure of the culture we’re all swimming around in and it’s a failure that costs us dearly in safety, wellbeing and reputations. A cost still boringly being demanded of us by the usual top tier commercial plunderers we let get away with it.

From ground up and top down alike, could some of us behave like real leaders in the stories and characters we choose to champion? To illustrate our vision.

What we’re all kinda waiting for is leaders who will show us futures that have invested in us.

So does change happen in a key moment?

I do tend to bank on this. But it’s more like change manifests then, after years brewing, like all evolution. Which also means such moments are like dealing with the weather and getting out in nature: You can’t control anything except which pants you pull on, and what you pay attention to before choosing them.

“This is a moment for an actual temperature test” said Nish Kumar, “– the sort of temperature test that we didn’t have when Joe Cox was murdered”.

“It’s okay to be scared” he added, addressing everyone in his audience clearly feeling the fresh skin sweats of racial hatred. “I am clinically scared – but I know we’ll be alright. Because we are the sons and daughters of people who faced this before and beat it.”

So, in this context, I feel Not Going Back resonating – and wonder how far it might. 

Working with what we’ve got.

There is a vibe around this phrase that almost seemed to fall out of Kamala Harris’s first speech, that c o u l d bring people together in larger numbers than fear of change has been doing so. Not Going Back. When her audience in the mid west just spontaneously chanted it back to her and stopped her in her tracks, I felt a little jolt of electricity. 

Emotional truth unlocked. Could it be shared between millions of us?

The historic truth could, of course, stop us working with it.

As heavily US-funded Israel reportedly delivered a truck full of unidentifiable Palestinian bodies into Gaza this week, it might not exactly be easy for you to chant Not Going Back with any sincerity.

Our context is real. Our supposed freedoms unequal, hard-won by some, easily lost by everyone. And while riots across England looked dumbly violent, they weren’t just chillingly well orchestrated by political players. As professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College Corey Rubin said to Adam Conover three quarters of a year ago, good liberals really shouldn’t be constantly othering the cheerleaders of Trump or Yaxley Lennon as dumb. There are emotional truths being triggered by the grifters, and deep internal stories in all of us.

But we are not just one story. Not one of us. And we get to edit the one we think we’re in.

Those images that flooded in after the same weekend I was standing on that little vulnerable stage at World Of Love festival, feeling like I had so little skin in the game. The anti-fascist throngs diffusing and wrong-footing more planned hate mob stuff. How many of us together seem to have felt that this is about all our futures. Because it so obviously is.

A local Facebook friend of mine has been learning out loud in all this, impressively. I won’t name him, but his questions and testimony to having a go at standing up for the better us lot have been honest and challenging. Having been to anti facist protests at least three towns around us, he concluded a realistic but heartening post about his experiences like this:

”Do not lose sight of the reason we do this. It is NOT a 'protest'. It is not a game, or a fun day out. It is protecting your community from a potentially violent, hateful mob. Yes, it might be in the town where you live and work. You might even know some of the people on the opposite side. But if this is your calling, to counter the racist hate, good for you… This racist vitriol really is a small minority, and today it showed. Good job!”

The reflex to other fellow humans is boringly, bone-freezingly universal. We should know with flint in the soul it serves the few in power, not the most of us. It’s a habit to get out of fast, where survival and wellbeing are concerned – even as I know which side of the lines I’ll be standing at the next public stand-off. The old system is out to use all of us, as we dare to try to transition ourselves out of it. Sometimes you have to use one bit of it to fight another. Like building a raft from the bits of the ship that crashed.

But if it’s a story inside us, all a different future takes is practice.

Alexandria’s passionate call at Climate Week made clear that we will have to – practice it, ordinary us lot. But that we really can, if we want it, if we organise and if we can see why to bother putting in some hours. Including taking off some old blinkers to see who is really standing next to us.

“We organise out of hope. We organise out of commitment. We organise out of love. We organise out of the beauty of our futures.”

So the question is: Which future will we go out to meet?

—-

What does a society look like in which the arts are healthy? One in which we are all consistently productive? Or one in which we all feel involved in facing big crisis and change? The brand new music show from Momo:tempo was a symbolic first happening for me, showing up with some roof-shaking art where I most want to be – where the business of change is being figured out. And needs some life force.

Have you lost a day this week?

You have if you’re following a Mayan calendar, which you probably are because you’re so far ahead of the curve you are already at least 12,000 years behind it. 

We should really work together more, we might begin to sync our galactic cycles.

July 25th is celebrated by some as the Day Out Of Time – the make-up day, 365th, after thirteen months of exactly 28 days. This method follows the cycles of the moon very logically and gives us one non-date in every year to get groovy and drop out and give thanks and make art. Another clear bit of evidence that we are mainly all just dealing with getting over Europe’s Roman shit. You bet US Republicans have been shouting to crown a Caesar and end the republic.

I lose days often and so do you, but because you have an Actual Job you still get paid something while also having to report creatively to someone what the hell you did with that lost day. I only have to explain it to me and Mrs Peach usually, and what we both know at our stage of experience is that not all days fit a “calendar” – from the of course Latin kalendarium or “account book”. 

Not everything we do neatly adds up to productivity. Duh.

Like life’s natural processes, a lot of stuff slowly cooking under the surface looks like bugger all at all going on on the surface. Then one day you grow legs. Or quietly beat your phone to pieces with your Keepcup.

Creating art is very like this, I can attest. I now understand more confidently that everything you do is going into your soulful cooking pot to simmer – and taking regular breaks, the sort that your grandad’s factory foreman would clutch his dangerously open-necked pearls at you taking, only helps the flavour ferment all the more effectively. Stop trying to force it, mate – the work ethic is a lie. There are ways to pace the process professionally within the parameters of deadlines and budgets, and those can even help sharpen the focus and help you keep a few clients. But at this stage you should surely stop kidding yourself that everything you do can be churned out with robot precision exactly when you want it. 

And by you I mean me, obviously. Even I want to be a machine sometimes. Ideally one that prints money – machine earning, if you will.

Life likes plenty of slack spaces to soak up movement. Even engineers know to put in grommets, bridge bearings and expansion joints.

I’ve been going through years of being v e r y slow at producing the core of my own art, music – but it’s obvious why, and it’s not because of the universally understood human challenges of tending to family and getting triggered on Facebook. It’s because, as a highly attuned and intellectually nuanced creative, I was always going to get a bit distracted at some point by the world exploding into flames.

It isn’t. Some of it is that really shouldn’t be. Most of it is just under massive strain and not working very well. Many things never did in the first place.

If I’d learned how to work the Grantium system and pitch things into it that Arts Council England would readily fund to try to help us all make sense of this, I might not find this moment in history any more buoyant. Campaign For The Arts launched a report this week that paints a grim picture of the place of the arts in the UK right now. 

“The UK's government spending on arts and culture is among the lowest in Europe” the organisation says, from analysis of all kinds of available statistics they’ve pulled together. “Since 2010, local government culture funding has fallen by 48% in England, 40% in Wales and 29% in Scotland. Arts education is in crisis. GCSE and A-level entries in arts subjects have decreased by 47% and 29% respectively in the last 14 years…”

Interestingly, Campaign For The Arts starts every section of its report with the words: “A society in which the arts are healthy is one in which…” before explaining how apparently collapsed are our cultural smokers lungs from stolen factory fag breaks. 

Across provision, education, employment, engagement and general funding of arts in Cool Britania, we are now in desperate need of some expansion joints.

But before I smash-cut to subheading, notice something there. 

Exactly what does our *society* think the arts even is/are – and what expectations do they/we have of it/their place among them/us? Apart from a lot more slashes.

Melvin Bragg’s older-than-Biden take on why Art Matters with a gang of successful chums all even older than I am – which at this point is only possible in politics and old media – doesn’t seem to be helping this national cultural drift at all.

Post-war Britain was incredible for investing in our creative voices. But ours are very different times now. How can we help each other find the (say it with me:) new songs and stories of us? Us now.

Perhaps I really should just stop writing this bloody blog and get back out there in earnest and demonstrate – as an actual artist. We need all of us raising that flag for art on the hill it’s currently supposedly dying on, don’t we? Or do we? 

Well, if I do get out there with it more, I’ll be tempted to go to places where I think art is not only sorely needed but has barely been seen or even slightly understood at all.

Like, I dunno. 

Innovation symposiums for government, business and education.

Hold my Keepcup.

Rediscovery.

Matt Desmier. I helplessly owe him an increasing list of brilliant experiences. But this spring he commissioned me to bring something to a futury event for Bournemouth University, and it wasn’t a pithy keynote about creativity or some such. It was some actual art.

It was a music show.

I’ve done a few gala dinners in my time. Hosted, branded, helped to organise around the world, but I’ve not been The Turn before. Now here it’s worth noting that it’s not like Momo:tempo is really the most profiterole-friendly background entertainment for a chatty networking event. It, ah, tends to demand your attention.

I am not too dispirited that half the room left. I think I would have left, if I was in the middle of a conversation with a real person over a glass of Chardonnay about a start-up idea. 

But among the half who stayed were people who really got it.

“This was really good, really good” said one person of the event, screen-grabbed to me by Desmo in the following days, “10/10 for keynotes, 12/10 for band choice. They deserve to be on a big stage.”

But who was in the room?

The Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) Practitioners Conference, took place in the middle of June 2024. Matt said he blagged hosting it, but he says that about many things he tries for the first time. What he undoubtedly did was pitch some new relevance and pizzazz and connected thinking in how to talk about KTPs and their potential. He’s a space holder for better conversations about stuff.

KTPs essentially aim to plug in academic expertise to “business-critical projects”, a way to put researchers and young students alike together with innovators trying to solve problems in commercially viable ways. And that includes bringing together the funding streams to make things happen, part government, part universities, part business.

As Knowledge Transfer Partnerships manager at Innovate UK, Richard Lamb, told me afterwards, KTP is likely to be the oldest running UK Governement programme – it’s nearly as old as me. And, under Innovate UK, it’s part of the sprawling UKRI suite of research going on nationally.

On the night, he’d approached me and said enthusiastically: “That was a total experience.”

This guy gets it, I thought.

But then he said something that hit me even deeper: “Name a spot of innovation that’s emerged from this country and we were probably part of it – I’ve seen it all” he said, a little sparkly eyed with the thought “and what you brought tonight felt like it covered all of it musically.”

I blinked. 

I mean, wow. 

That was, yes, a bit of a moment for me. 

The second I’d stepped off the little riser stage, a responsible senior leader had approached me and told me my work as an artist was speaking as much about futures as any of the research, writing and interviews with clever people I’ve been exploring. I did have to take that in for a second.

I mean, he may have been heavily talking about just one particular song which is essentially a litany of jargon-tangled innovation concepts, only a couple of which are deliberately made up – a piece called ABCDHuman, exploring the scifi theme the upgrading of ourselves.

But I did get to perform a lot of pieces from the most conspicuously unfinished project of my artistic life The Shape of Things To Hum – the Momo:tempo LP that sparked my whole journey into sustainability and futures storytelling. And it IS all about the big themes of science fiction, and how we have been effectively teaching ourselves tomorrow for generations. Very particular tomorrows, mostly. As in, we’re overdue to write new ones.

But this isn’t a launch show for that exactly. I use present tense, because this performance was effectively some live R&D right there in the middle of an innovation event for something that is now on-goingly available – it was me, road testing a new format to take on the road.

The result is a first playlist of pieces that combines some massive Momo classics – classics to the hyper-niche sophisticates like you who know – with new pieces very particularly engaging with futury ideas. A show that threads a loose narrative through all of them, to in some way address where we are as animals stuck in particular stories of our own making.

It’s not heavily scripted, it’s about the music. But as a Momo experience requiring a dance floor, it’s definitely still a playful take on the now of fearsome unrealities that Unsee The Future has been exploring all this time. 

I’ll admit it felt a bit counter intuitive to break into song and dance at an event that felt like the countless business events I’ve been part of before at which I am usually straining to keep an adult and professionally credible demeanour.

Locking it all together with video into a Keynote document only blurred the mental boundaries of this further for me.

But it is as clearly the work I do as anything. Because we need the possibilities bringing alive. And that can simply start with hearing a sound you’ve never heard before and being reminded that nothing is fixed. Especially our futures.

In giving me that stage, Matt was a real mate to me again here. He even danced.

But it was also a chance to work with another dear mate. Mark Adkins rode out with me on virtually all my previous Momo:tempo live shows as drummer and has the branded kick skin to prove it. Having both of us not played in a shame-invoking number of years, this felt partly like therapy. 

It felt like getting our days back.

Symbolic, perhaps, that Mark’s daughter Beth is now a live show production manager and took the helm of the sound for us in the room. And while Momo’s horn department may have been unavailable, thanks to Chaka Khan, with superlative talent Jack Whitton joining us on percussion we still got right in amongst what makes Momo:tempo so much joy to be in the middle of live.

It does indeed take knowledge partnerships to bring things to life well.

If I can do anything with this new show, it’ll be to help us all rediscover our capacity to create, and so feel part of our own futures again.

Just some of those days might even feel joyful.

To book Rediscovery for your event, DM me now.

Of five or six live premiers, a couple of them older pieces, I finally got to perform this live:

The visionary leaders and organisations right now will understand it – if you want to build a confident future somewhere you have to practice up a fearless culture of making it. In the behind the scenes recording of my latest article for Pier Journal, the infectiously forward-looking Nicola Cartlidge from AUB walks me around a creative space an art school is holding for a whole town.

The theatre of war. It’s seems an especially chilling phrase this week, as the events leading into the Republican party congress in the US put political violence together with unifying spectacle for the right wing. Our news feeds and threads are, of course, gorging on it. 

For those of us championing more radical inclusion and creative, regenerative futures, the door to an even more dangerous looking next few years seems to have opened wider.

So what would we do on the other side of that? For vulnerable people, for environment, for global security, for justice, for truth… for you and me?

What will it mean in the coming months to hold space for such things?

I had to take an afternoon out in a favourite landscape a couple of days ago to get my head around how to respond. A natural environment I grew up in locally that, on a summer day seems a world away from world drama, Hengistbury Head. Inspired to get out there after a gently enchanting appearance of it on the BBC’s Countryfile, this same weekend.

Ancient natural terrain or dense urban streetscapes alike can seem immoveable and remind you how small you are. It can be comforting.

As I say in that little video, looking forward at any time is partly about squaring up to our fears – how we ever face them, but especially when everything seems to be changing.

Nicholas Serota is chair of Arts Council England and, in a piece quietly published last weekend amid everything else, he appeals to the new UK government to facilitate “a cultural reboot” of the country. “Five areas” he says, “in which I believe the cultural sector can collaborate with government to achieve renewal.”

He suggests ways to insert arts curricula into the schooling and experiences of young children, young people, local communities and global conversations. All of which sounds worth getting behind. But big cultural institutions and those used to working in them can find it hard to speak completely in plain language, outside professional sector assumptions.

Explaining what art even is seems the primary cultural mission to me in all those places. To get under the skin of what thinking like an artist in times of crisis could mean for each of us practically. Before we can do also the vital work of training us all to navigate our cultural ecologies much more consciously for our health – and for resilience to political triggering.

Rebooting real cultural capabilities I think would mean going back to our roots with art itself, and why humans actually need it so centrally. Doing so could develop some real new resiliences in all of us, a culture we’re not really used to in daily life – responding creatively, demonstrating alternatives, shining a light on emotional truths without simply being triggered.

It’s my central belief about how to be alive and inspired in fearsome times. Something I’ll be breaking down more practically in a campaign soon.

Yet, in the spirit of show don’t tell, an interview I was invited to conduct for Pier Journal #08 took me to meet someone taking over an inspiring space being held in just the sort of way a community needs in order to look forward with more confidence.

LISTEN TO THE SPECIAL NEW EPISODE OF
UNSEE THE FUTURE: THE HOPEYCHATTYBITS >

Holding space, making place.

Nicola Cartlidge is the new manager of the Palace Court Theatre in Bournemouth. Taken over by AUB in recent years, my first experience of what they’ve been doing with the old building was over a year ago, so I was looking forward to going back and discovering progress.

The sense I made of my chat with Nicola you can find in Pier’s beautiful summer edition, now covering the whole of Dorset and invoking the best of festival season down here. It’s full of people helping to make place where they live creatively – and this tracks with the Palace Court. Because AUB very consciously wants to contribute as a university to the reputation and experience of Bournemouth’s currently struggling town centre.

But it’s not simply about entertainment. It’s about defending a place for experimentation – trying stuff, and finding stronger creative legs.

This is a foundational behaviour of art, to practice up confident mark making through doing stuff and learning fast from young mistakes. But if we consider that the greatest artists of any kind were much more often than not products of a creative scene – a networking community of thinkers and makers all fizzing off each other – such generous collaborative thinking by a big organisation is not just heartening, it’s exciting.

In a similar spirit to my observations of working with Hexagon’s goals in manufacturing, there is a vital way that established entities with some scale can help change and innovation – by holding some space for the little guys. For the newcomers and outsiders.

It’s not easy to protect the practice of this and its budgets. But it’s how to change things more conspicuously where you are – and how to build an inspiring reputation. Seems important to an educational establishment, no?

Nicola is excited about it. But I asked her bluntly: “Is AUB going to hold it’s nerve?” 

She said yes.

It should. There’s more at stake than just student numbers, or even graduate retention. The very reputation of the town in the university’s name could be enhanced by having such an experimental, creative space available for makers and lovers alike. And in it, more people could learn how to think a bit more like artists, and so change worlds.

This is how we help show each other how to reboot creativity, and with it our futures.

In the informal recording of our conversation, you can hear Nicola walk me around the theatre and discover how to explore its spaces for yourself – it’s fun. But you can hear just how much she understands what the possibilities are.

A huge thank you to Sammy Murphy for opening the door to this lovely conversation for Pier Journal.

——

Trying to muster big change usually feels like a pain in the pelvic floor but, for millions of us, this last week has turned a lot of fearful clenching into some sudden noises of release. As I discovered at a special day hosting with the RSA and Battery Tour recently, however, real change feels like something deeper – and you don’t have to wait another four years to get it.

I don’t think many of us are getting over-excited.

Labour’s UK election win wasn’t a vote of passion. France’s surprise switcheroo away from the far right in its second-round election has left ungovernable uncertainty. And England do like to leave it ‘till the FINAL MINUTE to put away a winning goal.

Won’t lie, still all feels quite good though, eh?

A surprising amount gooder than most of us are used to feeling about national issues, whether we understand refereeing decisions or not.

At least for a few hours, or even days, I’ll say it feels like relief. Like a weight being lifted a bit. Potential returning. Along with blood supply to your largest sphincter. Maybe.

Now, I’ve suggested for years that a lot of business leaders talking about transformation and change at innovation events won’t really want it because transformation and change is a bigger headache than your election night hangover and no one really knows what it looks like anyway. Like sustainability. Or recent would-be MP for Clapham & Brixton Hill Mark Matlock. To really do change is to invite in creative crazy talk and, after the inspiring keynote, that just seems silly and unbankable. Y’know, in the real world… where definitely every single Reform candidate and global corporate shareholder absolutely lives.

Perhaps in line with this, someone like Matt Desmier might also add that, despite all the futury innovation voices in your Linked In feed, we’d all do well to consider just how much of our futures will be made up of stuff we already know.

Still. Change is constant and total as a state of existence. So much, what most of us are really doing every day is our best to ignore it. ..And there you are trying to make it, you silly lefty sausage.

Then, one day, after all the work and wait, change just makes itself obvious.

Like this post, perhaps. If it’s shown up in your inbox as a long-time Momo:amigo, it’s not the Memo you’ve been getting for twelve years, and I do hope you had my final one on Tuesday explaining. This change, for me and all Momo’s work, makes a lot of sense – and I so hope you’re happy to dial around my new Substack space and follow all its links to all the ways I’m personally exploring how to think like an artist and change the world.

Changing the weather.

Change in humans’ sensible decision making hilarity starts with culture. Something in the brain turning a different colour. Like all hopes of engagement, mood matters. Last spring, when the council changed from Conservative to Liberal Democrat and positive political partners like the Greens in my local authority, I know that going to work felt different to the professionals in there. The daily signals of values, attitudes, vision. Leadership sets a tone for trust or fear, with a massive motivational difference triggered or cultivated in us as a result.

Now that we’ve had something similar f i n a l l y happen in Westminster, we all have a sense of how that changes what we feel is possible in our nation, those of us in the UK. Even with an election campaign leading up to this so uninspiring we were home-tattooing the days of it onto our inner thighs to relieve the numbness. We didn’t do lockdown training for nothing.

But, whatever the relief, the economic trends everywhere haven’t changed. A new report from Influence Map today seems typical. All those outputs into the structures of our daily lives in all the material and cultural fails still add up to a ballooning nightmare of injustices, poisons and no one mentioning The Asset Class.

So I’ll suggest that what you may well be feeling as a hitherto-unwanted reasonable and caring progressive voter this week, if you think of yourself as one, isn’t change. It’s payback. A tiny hit of petty power. You’re basically Farage now. ..Feels a bit sexy, doesn’t it.

What does actual positive change really feel like, then, to know you’re doing it?

In other words, how can you feel like you’re making a personal difference in epically horrible times once the relief wears off?

Well for starters, I’m happy to say it doesn’t mean searching for a political G*-spot. (Ew.) It’s much more to do with more literally making music.

Joining the action.

London Climate Action week took place across the last week of June and I’d been invited by showbiz changemaker and music pal AY Young to co-host some sessions with him at the RSA. The first, Building Bridges was a streamed couple of panels with a live audience that aimed to: “explore how to break down the barriers and bridge the divides that prevent progress towards sustainability and regeneration”.

AY had managed to bring together a selection of friends that typified his attitude and mission – sector-leaping partnership.

Zoologist and greenfluencer Margreen joined sci & planning student and entepreneur in Liverpool Hana Sanadi, data expert Musidora Jorgensen, Chief Impact Officer with the World Wide Generation, fellow data lover Nadia Humphreys, Sustainable Finance at Bloomberg, Shomy Hasan Chowdhury, Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) activist, the ever-dynamic Daniel Stander, Special Advisor to the United Nations, and Andrew Teverson, owner and director at festival clean energy biz The Stage Bus – they all sat next to each other in this first session and didn’t need the context explaining at all. I think most people on the panel quoted Sustainable Development Goal 17 Partnerships readily – all of them very in line with one of the RSA’s major themes in its 270th year – radical collaboration.

But the thing I want you to snap back to and take note of, is who was sitting in the middle of these names – a music artist. He was the catalyst figure for us all being together.

The principle became more explicit perhaps in the other streamed panel chat, Music for impact – and after a day of hosting and listening, this was where I allowed myself a just a few preachy interjections off the leash. Because, this gets to the nub of things for me. Duh.

Jarvis Smith musician, founder of My Green Pod and the PEA awards, Lisa Merrick Lawless, co founder of Purpose Disruptors, Eleanor Anderson, behavioural economist passionate about the environment joined us on stage for a longer discussion with a very engaged audience. Music artist Alex Hepburn got caught in London traffic and sadly missed the panel but was a learned chat afterwards.

How does music really make impact? Is it a few well known figures finally getting over their fears of imperfect green hopes and sometimes saying a few environmental things? Is it writing more about our environmental experiences? Is it powering concerts with clean energy and reducing landfill merch?

Yes and maybe and certainly and jeepers yes please and, hey, let’s explore all that. But I think it also means something symbolic that I’m trying to embody and that AY fizzingly does. Standing in the middle of different practical sectors as a figure of creative confidence.

“A bank working with an artist, that’s absurd” as he said to our other panelist and rep from one of his biggest sponsors – a bank.

But Sarisher Mann, Sustainable Finance communication lead at BNP Paribas CIB has a very instructive testimony. Not just to the themes our day but perhaps to the very work of the RSA. She brings passion and energy to her role challenging systems in and with Europe’s largest bank, but the simple observation that she is someone with a financial background who moved into sustainable finance, then into global climate advocacy, into place-based project testing and now into fellowship at the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce is a symbolic path. All that creative energy has led her to feel part of the arts.

This isn’t just a cute framing by an artist. It’s a thing for any of us “change!”makers to notice consciously. When you leap confidently between sectors to connect people and ideas, following a vision to see something realised into the world, you are thinking and behaving exactly like an artist.

Making the difference.

Stopping over with Rogue Futures founder and cultural ecologist, Regina Atienza, I was reminded that she is another dear mate with whom I really should hit Record before we even order the drinks. She said something to me the night before that got to the heart of the potential before we’d even had the day.

“We don’t need more conversations about creativity. We need to put more musical instruments in people’s hands.”

Just pause there. Take that in.

We don’t need more conversations… about how to do creative change. About models of engagement and thinking. We need to put more musical instruments in people’s hands.

That IS the change. The feeling of making a different vibration with your body, your heart and, yes, your imagination.

In a session with AY and RSA boss, after 30 years with the Bank of England, Andy Haldane, moderated by Sarisher, I nudged Rina conspiratorially in the audience to bring some of the gold from our chat the night before. She raised her hand and asked AY bluntly:

“How many artists have you created with your work?”

A challenge, even for him. The vision of his initiative Project 17 is to bring together all sorts of artists and corporations in a conspicuous leap across sectors, languages and thinking. But really, the challenge of global culture change is to unlock art in all of us. Our personal capability to respond creatively.

Unprompted, later in that session, something happened that interrupted the great chats with the perfect experience of this.

Lama Tashi Norbu simply stood and said: “If I may, I’d like to lead us all in a song.”

An artist now based in the Netherlands, Tashi is a Tibetan Buddhist and was dressed very conspicuously in his robes, having also just come from a meeting of indigenous leaders in another room, so none of the polite white folk among us would obviously have had a clue how to say: “Nah, mate, we’re having a nice academic discussion about policy implications”. Which was obviously splendid.

So, there in the room, he immediately bid us repeat and riff on a phrase, melodically. People took stumbling vocal steps into the chorus. We grew more confident. The room changed.

When he ended and everyone erupted, I called across the room to him as the applause died down:

“May I ask what we were invoking with that song? What’s the spirit of what we all joined in with?”

“It’s calling for fruitfulness in our creative endeavours” he said and explained a little of its sense of prayer.

Later that evening he came over and handed me his card. I thanked him for what he’d done: “You just cut through the talk and showed us what creativity feels like. What change feels like.” He politely nodded and smiled.

Creativity, the acts of it, practicing expressions of what we’re feeling and thinking, feels like change to me. Because, as it shimmers out of your bones and into the work, it builds a vital vibration in you – confidence. It changes you in the doing. And it is only practice. It is natural for us to do this – to make new worlds out of apparently nothing and to lean into transformation, step by step.

God knows, we need new chapters. Circumstantial help to turn a corner; an internal weather change. I am working for it with Momo.

But as showbiz adland mate Gellan Watt said yesterday: “We are not a single body of work. We have chapters. New origins. Inside perspectives. Outside perspectives. Tales. Learning. Opportunities. Chances missed. Chance taken. We are change.”

No wonder that when we respond to problems with art, making things, testifying creatively, we can feel change like something different. It feels like something happening in you.

It feels like the future.

Watch the RSA Replay of Building bridges: London Climate Action Week:

Watch the RSA Replay of Music for impact: London Climate Action Week:

And, as an extra, if you fancy a little unedited walk with me back to get the train home afterwards, here I share some off the cuff thoughts about establishments and engagements, in: It feels like this:

( *G = Grifters, obviously. )

I'm a creative critical friend who will help you talk about the future again.

In the unsettling age of climate change and cultural transformation, I use my creative confidence, experience and insights to help leaders get their people more practically excited about crisis and change, and about alternative, more values-driven ways forward. By hosting and helping to create special events, campaigns and experiences.

Where does nature's intelligence meet artificial intelligence? And how can supposedly sensible business get good plans for people and planet around them both?

You can start by having an encouraging chat with me. I like to simply do that with people.

And this platform is where we can go for a virtual walk at least. I’ve been blogging for the twenty years I’ve been running and being Momo – my creative production house. Sharing what I’m up to, promoting the projects with partners, the music as an artist and the milestones of discovery about the world. But here I am reposting the work and thinking that’s come together especially in the 2020s from all those years of exploration – my sense of purpose in this very particular moment in history.

Why do we need art more than anything in the era of crisis? You won’t believe me yet, perhaps, but here I shall be sharing about the work and thinking I’ve been developing with different partners and why I think each experience adds to this world view I now have.

From music, to sustainability research, to creative partnership, Unsee The Future has become a kind of brand platform to share my sensemaking of all the work I present, write, compose and talk about. A worldview I seek to evidence that is typically me – still playful, respectfully a little irreverent, exploring very imperfectly what hope even dare mean coming from a terrible revolutionary in a darkening era of fearsome unrealities.

But what, after all, makes reality? And where does it mostly live?

Before all that, to get you going if you are reading this first ever UTF on Substack, who the heck am I?

Who am I?

I bring alive tricky ideas, stories, trends and possibilities with inspiring creative experiences, in rooms and on screens – so you can get your story straight. And your strategy much clearer in the heads of your partners.

Drawing on a lifetime of work as a distinctive performer, host, speaker, designer, writer, events creative, music artist and composer, I help ESG champions light up rooms and changemakers feel less alone. Bringing together art and business with some cultural strategy, I help specialists and technical experts talk about difficult stuff with much more impact.

I bring together uniquely entertaining experiences and experts – from essential climate workshops to creative direction for events, CPD and campaigns. And I'll help you find your own voice in the possibilities.

Inspired by solarpunk, my personal passion as an arts champion and creative business encourager is to connect more of us to the possibilities found in the challenges of the 21st century – and to understand more about art's practical magic for changing the stories we think we're in.

I am the bloke from Momo:tempo, the voice of Unsee The Future, creative director of Momo:zo, member of the Association of Sustainability Practitioners, board member for Arts By The Sea festival, and co founder of the emerging Rogue Futures Initiatives. Author of "UTF! How to think like an artist and change the world", I am currently developing "The Shape of Things To Hum – an electro cabaret musical to end the end of the world".

Talking about #sustainability #futures #storytelling I draw together knowledge of #art #nature #ai #culture #creativity #culturalstrategy #futuresiteracy #scifi #solarpunk #leadership #planet

You might like to muck about in my general YouTube collection to get the idea:

Visit Momo on YouTube

If you think your home studio, your poetry, your antics at the musical society are left-over bits of secret artistic failure, it’s time to extinguish any lingering shame and think more consciously with your creative side-hussle. For just one thing, as the new episode of Intertwingularity explores, it’s YOU who has the wizard skillset to put AI to truly useful use. So, for goodness sake start leading by example, you diva.

Most people don’t make money out of art. Art isn’t even a proper job.

Resource Manager is a proper job.

Still believe this?

My mother and father always told me art was absolutely a proper job. Mum only admitted to me this week they couldn’t believe that working in the D’Oyle Carte for years together felt more like a massive party every night followed by a paycheque. My parents lied to me.

You could fairly say that our global problem is that most of our parents lied to us about creativity. That we couldn’t do it – or shouldn’t. That it made no sense, that you shouldn’t be a troublemaker, that scruffy layabouts don’t make good husbands. That you had to be chosen to be a star.

Let me stand and say it in our creative recovery meeting: If you’re nursing deeply private failure about not making more out of your youthful playing, you’re carrying phantom shame. Because the truth is, we need you. 

Like, really need you at this point. Your courage to articulate some emotional truth and your ability to practice some problem-solving like an artist.

And you are not alone, even at work.

One great client of mine for many years first took me to Christmas lunch some time into developing their brand. And over better-than-I’d-normally-fork-out-for Chardonnay, it took him not even into the main course to ask me if I wanted to hear his teenage poetry.

He was a very successful founder in the financial world. By which I mean, his company was doing great and he still had a balanced life.

I could see in his eye two clear things: One, he knew I’d get it. Two, he knew it was good.

It was. I couldn’t have written something so mature when I was sixteen. He had it in his pocket ready to go. I loved and respected him even more after this.

It’s not that you need telling about empathy at work. It’s more that you think what drove you when younger and freer and more poetic has to be left at home in order to get on at work.

Heck, there’s nothing like focus and realism. But if you really do want to be real, our society is failing in a thousand different obvious ways every day. The open secret is that lots of old business bosses aren't half as capable as we hope for, and many are desperate for some anchors of certainty right now. Equity is still a joke. Heads of state are feckless, crooks, genocide funders. And the life systems keeping your kids in food are collapsing. All because we keep believing that Resource Manager is a thing and we shouldn’t be helping our people to bring imagination and soul to work.

Not because we don’t appreciate some of this, it’s just we often don’t know what to do with it at work. There are few places to put it. Nothing of our systems of valuation and production are built to plug it in and measure it.

So, with generative AI about to take away all opportunity for creativity, everyone’s going to feel like a failed festival headliner.

No?

You. Have I taught you nothing?

Thinking really local.

You may have learned to be a very sensible seeming soul, by which I mean very employable and promotable. Well done for faking this convincingly enough, if so. I sort of think everyone is trying to. 

The difference that may be making you read this article is a growing niggle in you that wants to change… something about your business as usual.

In the first of a three-part series re-run for The Association of Sustainability Practitioners , Finiteness in the context of sustainability, Nora Kroeger and Gwyn Jones led an exploration of how we’re affected by environmental crisis and worry, by comparing ways we navigate our place in nature with how we do our place in popular culture. One idea our typically soulful discussion as a group threw up was that the corporate global systems we all go to work in are a way to outsource our care. 

Disconnected from the context of human and more than human community in meep-moop individualist modern life, it’s all too easy to end up taking some big decisions without feeling the consequences of them. Hello corporate CEOs and university fund investors. Post the strategic decision into the ether and drive home to the family. We mostly aren’t working in the more “natural” environment of place-based physical, local, community; there’s sobering symbolism when street trees come down – they don’t nobly decay in nature, they get carted off by the council.

But one part of that ancient context you can’t fully escape is still trying to send you signals every day. Your own body. It’s still made of all that nature community stuff.

This is still true when using generative AI. It will still be true when general AI emerges and starts asking us from every device WTF, man?

Making sense of this practically will require the skills you use to make a defiant noise in the back of the local with your guitar. Really.

I’ll lay it out more in a future campaign launch, but in my forthcoming book I’ve taken note of some nine practices of artists that I think the era of crisis needs us all to be flexing more. A big one is having the creative confidence to try things. And a big driver of doing this can be the instinct to personally testify. When do we more need to do this than when we’re hurting?.

Daniel Thorson shared a particularly personal, moving encounter on his Emerge podcast recently. The recording of his chat to Jane Weintraub seems to have caught them both in a moment. They don’t use the word “suffering” exactly, but their conversation clearly flowed out of finding themselves each in the middle of it.

Jane observed something. Something that might represent the operational fault line between the robot world of automation and zero sum economics, and the regenerative world of nature trying to re-emerge in our lives: 

There is a distinction between “trying to fix your heartbreak” and living with the “aliveness” of pain. 

The aliveness of pain. 

She describes this as “fuel for your holy work.” A phrase that makes me tremble at the image of a techbro keynote speaker coming out with it.

“There’s a redemptive quality in giving our lives for something true and good and beautiful” Daniel responded.

Redemption. Another word you wouldn’t readily have use for in a shareholder report.

“I love that,” Jane replied, “because we are anchored to our bodies , we’re anchored to the concrete. We’re anchored to the multi-dimensionality of aliveness that’s everywhere. I’m a gal who loves abstraction, who loves analysis – I love it! But in the holy work…?”

They both sort of sniggered and stopped for a couple of beats. Like a no-words-needed huh.

I here imagine a smash-cut to a reverse shot of a board room of blank looking corporate stakeholders across the table we hadn’t known Daniel and Jane were having this honest conversation in front of.

“There’s some kind of deep connection between the work we’re meant do, or need to do or love to do, want to do… and the reality of the body and the pain of the heart and the fragility of this vessel” Daniel said, apparently ignoring the board completely.

Jane replied in a way that may get us to the nub of our AI contemplations: “This intelligence keeps us so local.”

As local as it gets. The emotional truth of our own body, our true feelings. 

“When we talk about the meta crisis or any of the big issues like AI, I lose my body. Because it’s just really abstract – and cool and interesting, right? But when I’m in my grief, I’m local. ..I can’t really look away” she went on. “I have to feel things I maybe don’t want to feel and encounter my self in ways that are very confronting.” 

This doesn't sound very Linked In.

But if you’re a leader actually wanting to solve some big problems, a change maker wrestling with the unjust logistics of a world in massive transition, the what to do and how fix things sort of drops away when you are forced to be in your body. What matters becomes kind of clearer. Some truth is more obvious. Because it’s more whole-felt.

Your body is your reminder of your real context. You’re always part of life. It's aliveness.

I often talk about the role of storytelling as a vital bunch of practices for making the futures we actually want. But, like you, I don’t want to be told how to live. The more resiliently hopey-changey the language, the more I want to squirm out of my seat in the town hall meeting and run away. Yes, even me. But successful futuring isn’t about making people conform – a sin so many of us designers commit without realising, so keen are we to straighten pencils and tidy shiz up a bit in a dirty world. 

Creativity more genuinely is about holding space for people to safely bring their shiz out into the open. And see what encouragement echoes off each other in trying some things.

I’ve forgotten which meme floated past me this week proclaiming: “art exists, but there’s no such thing as an artist” but I agree with the sentiment. If only wizards can pull things out of thin air then it’s not the work of the likes of Facebooky ol’ you and me, mate. Right? The memist’s point being that it absolutely IS the work of ordinary, dumb-ass, uncreative you and me. For we are still alive, and are compelled to make sense of it.

AI can’t do this without you. When there’s no-one around, a text-prompted tree never falls in the digital forest.

There are no wizards. There’s just you and me and the things we do or don't practice with our innate instinct to wonder what if. 

What if I didn’t have to feel this way? What if you felt what I feel?

The better future is probably already leaking out of you now.

You got this.

——

WATCH HOW FOUR ARTISTS SURPRISINGLY MAKE SENSE OF THE THREAT TO THEIR WORK POSED BY AI, IN THE LATEST EPISODE OF INTERTWINGULARTY – WITH LEE, ANDY, SIMON AND TIMO >

Everyone is writing a future. Most of us don’t think that’s what we’re doing. Three change makers from very different professional sectors showed me recently that “future” really just means new community – and the way we’re all building the one we’ll end up part of is with regular daily signals of storytelling. So what are people picking up from you?

Are you in a perfect storm right now?

Or are you still muddling on?

Getting one particular business invoice through this morning I can tell you, a perfect storm can arise fast to disrupt years of muddling on.

But to find a sustainable new direction, a new purpose, a new life and energy in your business, you might need to find yourself in the right kind of perfect storm – one of personal realisation.

It’s the era of crisis – the perfect time for terrible weather! – and, between carbon audits and recruitment issues and supposed market trends and supply chain costs, you’re likely to be at least half trying to figure out what the unnerving 2020s really mean for your future – and for those depending on you. 

What skills do you and your people have in order to navigate the unknown and make something new out of it?

Change is an alien land, an “undiscovered country” that always involves a few developmental dead ends to reach. But are you yet ready to hear its call? 

“I found, on my long distance walks, that it really helped to sing as I went – and it changed my encounters with the more than human world.”

Dr Kevan Manwaring said this to me. He told me that by learning a song as he paced through the countryside, he’d encounter animal life curious about a human behaving a bit differently.

“Flocks of sheep, herds of cows, they would stop what they were doing and listen to me as I passed and it would change the whole energy of that encounter” he said. “I’ve had a yew and its lamb come towards me and let me stroke them as I was singing Blake’s Jerusalem.”

This is not a call for you to drift through your machine shop performing Tay’s Fortnight or favourite bits of The Mikado. Though, really, I do want to see that. This is rather a key note from the supposedly weird practices of art about embodiment.

The world you really want, you’ll have to show up for with your whole self.

Showing up with your whole self takes confidence. What three recent conversations have demonstrated to me is that it also increasingly makes it.

With everything I’ve been learning as a creative, I’ve become interested in how we develop creative confidence for change. So, as a three-part screen special of Unsee The Future, I invited three different change makers to share with me how they use storytelling practices to shape the world they want to be working in. And the last person I went to was an official “storyteller” in an art school.

The first person I went to is a leader in the property sector.

Right? Confidence.

Meet each of my three guests below, read some of the insights I gained from them and click on each header to watch our lovely full 20min conversations.

Produced by Bournemouth University TV production year two students, including a huge thank you to Kai Schuoler, Sam Lancey Isabel, Reannah, Oscar, Jaden, Tommy and the whole crew for making it a pleasure. With a big thank you too to tutor Adrian Butterworth and to Matt Desmier for the original invitation in to make these shows. Wonderful to meet everyone and get to encourage their talents – they made it a delight and as only second year they could already coach beginners as accomplished storytellers for live screen.

Nella Pang, Omega RE.

Nella Pang MRICS is a chartered surveyor and founder of Omega RE, a B Corp certified property management company. From a corporate background, she may be used to dealing with some immoveable seeming assets, but she realised the story she’s working in is not really about buildings and materials, it’s about people.

“Sustainability is more than carbon reduction, it’s about communities… it’s about how do we bring the next generation with us?”

I know from my own experiences as a brand and events creative, helping people find their voice in a wide variety of not exactly arty-farty sectors, that the technical challenges of a specific market often obscure professional perspective on what we’re really working with. 

“People want to do business with people” Nella says. “Unfortunately, adversity does not discriminate. If you asked a wide collection of people have you lost someone, do you suffer with mental health are you going through an illness, whatever it is, there will be a majority in the room who will be able to relate to that. So when I launched my business I thought, let’s drop the professional mask, let’s be vulnerable, let start to relating and connecting with clients who care about who they’re doing business with…”

And there is the narrative energy – emotional truth. Nella tapped into it in a professional space not at all used to it, despite it being the sector that deals with people’s life environments. She started with her own and shared it with courage. It’s turned into a mission to build new community around the work.

Making change for her means showing up with very defined values, then not being slow to speak up. Mark out the intent, then live into it. It’s live public role play. 

While you might think this sounds like a stretch to describe as “storytelling” you bet this reflects a practice of art, to do what Nella does in her context – making confident marks of conviction in public, partly as test, partly as testimony. She also creates spaces for people to hear stories of different ideas as she works – she instigates a lot of events, to pause the work itself and talk about it from new perspectives.

Mark out the different values, explain how you’re going to live into them, then demonstrate it as openly as you can, learning out loud, and scheduling in the social media and PR telling of what you’re doing. Then invite participation in that process regularly. There’s a change making format. By becoming known as much for creating thinking events and for encouraging different voices to speak up honestly, all with a twist of more creative, less boring experiences, Nella is building a community in property with different expectations.

When she invited me in to host a panel discussion at one of these events, I could see from the middle that this was two things to its audience: curious and likeable. An event tingling some new sense of possibilities.

But while you can maybe choose to be such a leader, cultures change when more and more people in a community feel encouraged to become consciously practicing storytellers with you.

WATCH OUR FULL CHAT HERE >

Annie Talboys, Seismic.

Annie Talboys is head of marketing at Seismic. An organisation that helps big corporates: “develop sustainability strategies and embedding them to drive impact” as she explains.

With a strong marketing background, where she worked for a range of creative and strategy agencies helping their clients drive growth, she understands storytelling as a vital beacon of brand. But today as a certified B-trainer as well, she knows what the purpose of any clear narrative really is.

“It’s about a community first. Making sure we’re inspiring our community, keeping them together, and part of the narrative is developing great stories that trigger people at certain decision making points. There’s got to be a thought, a belief there that my role is about helping to trigger that.”

But between inspiring rhetoric and real change, what’s needed?

“I think a lot of things need to line up, but it starts in the board room.” 

Someone at the old top needs to realise that something needs to change. Couple this with government and market pressures and, says Annie: “it can cause a perfect storm, and that’s the point when I can step in.”

What the right moment of realisation can reveal is a whole new way of seeing the world, and the start of a whole new journey. 

Making change as significant as the demands of the era of crisis, however, means living a kind of conscious narrative, telling and celebrating it in an ongoing habit; the milestones, the reporting, the building of a community that wants to will you on. 

“I feel like it’s bigger even than this, but the B Corp community feels like a real movement.”

Creative change is about more and more people demonstrating that they think they’re in a different story, an idea of how to work that’s bigger than them – something with “a common good, a common mission” bigger than everyone’s own endeavours but made up by them.

I liken it to a theatre or TV production – everyone’s job is a storytelling role. Camera op, sound recorder, actor, writer, director… they’re all there to help each other tell the one story. And so with an organisation’s pitch to become more sustainable, more purposeful – every role in the company is about encouraging that outcome. Which also makes it a storytelling role. 

Projecting, living into, demonstrating, testing out confidently and openly a big idea that a group of people want to come together to stand for. ..Y’know, an idea such as a world that’s not dumpster fire.

“More and more companies are realising it’s just the right thing to do…” says Annie. “The data suggests that B Corps are more resilient, they grow faster and also are able to attract and retain talent which is just a more solid business. But also they’re doing good in the world, which all seems… why wouldn’t you?”

That this is how you develop a fantastic brand is kind of mere overflow of the process. The real truth powering all this is… it’s good for the soul.

Which is the language of poets.

So can we learn some practical things directly from them?

What do you think? In an age of crisis, poets are Six Sigma practitioners at daring to put it all out there.

WATCH OUR FULL CHAT HERE >

Kevan Manwaring, Arts University Bournemouth.

Dr Kevan Manwaring is course leader of the MA in Creative Writing at AUB. He teaches literally how to tell stories of better futures in the age of crisis. As a poet, novelist and researcher, he’s always been fascinated with narratives and explored them across comics, film making and crucially, performing. And as he says, everyone has to be able to tell a good story.

“Bardic skills are ancient, they go back to pretty much the dawn of language. We are storytelling creatures, it’s how we make sense of the world. We narrativise, we mythologise. But those skills are as relevant today as ever – we all need to be able to use them.”

He himself was nervous when he first got up at poetry nights as a young man, fumbling with his notes and trying not to look at the crowd. In a move that would have earned him a gold star from Speakery founder Marcus John Henry Brown today, Kevan began to learn his poems by heart and found himself engaging with the crowd much more meaningfully in his performances. But storytelling in the central performative sense is more improvisationary and interactive even than this. It takes great narrative and expressive confidence. But it can transform rooms, streets and perspectives, is the point.

Confidence is just practice. And what you are really practicing as a storyteller is theatre.

Kevan’s new book is entitled: Writing Ecofiction – navigating the challenges of environmental narratives. But what are some of those challenges, does he think?

“The spectre of the preacher…” he says first. “You can’t just preach to the converted. You’ve got to try to connect with people with other belief systems, other paradigms – and do it in a way that is not proselytising or evangelising, and that’s really tricky. Getting people interested, getting them hooked uses all your narrative skills to create that traction and keep them engaged. And if you can do that, you can win over hearts and minds.”

“You don’t have to be too ceremonial and precious about it but if people feel relaxed they’ll listen.”

In trying to do something as grand and imperative and urgent and impossible feeling as encouraging big ideas of change, the pivotal role of storytelling is to create, as he puts it: “a moment of gnosis.”

A moment of realisation in the story. A sudden break in the clouds.

“But it has to happen inside them,” says Kevan. “All you can do as a storyteller is create the conditions to encourage it happening.”

Perhaps starting with, as I originally heard it, a moment of notice.

Art is always about “digging deep into yourself, to find your authentic voice” he says, “and that’s hard, especially in an age of AI. But I think more than ever we have to bring our full humanness. Use our idiosyncrasies and embodied histories in our storytelling and narratives. Bring your full self.”

From my lifetime of working with storytellers, I find myself wanting to encourage creative confidence for change in any leader I fall in step with who just needs a fresh shot of oxygen. But that essential theatre of narrative thinking can be put to significant use by creating a leadership-building moment of notice for a team – a turning point experience. An event to shake up the usual flow, and mark something changing.

I've been saying all my life as a music artist, finish things. Those artefacts of LPs and gig posters are milestones helping you feel the progress, pay respect to your own journey. Feel a little less lost. A little more energy in the next chapter.

The skills I’m used to seeing in action magically in fellow creatives and use myself every day really are essential to helping ordinary us lot unlock new personal energies from the era of crisis, to feel it much more like what it really is – the era of transition.

“It’s about finding myths to live by, changing the narrative that we have, certainly,” says Kevan, “but it’s really about empowering people – activating that vision, that voice of vocation inside someone else.”

I think we should be helping each other create a few more perfect storms.

WATCH OUR FULL CHAT HERE >

Watch Matt Desmier's interview with me about where I and Unsee The Future have come from >

With a huge thank you to Bournemouth University.

It’s hard to change the story we think we’re in when half the storytellers are still so invested in the old one. As a creative or a changemaker, if you want to summon more inspiring futures, are you thinking small enough or big enough? One event can show you exactly what that means.

A report by DeSmog and Clean Creatives revealed last week that half of all the board members of the six biggest global advertising agencies have big stakes in polluting industries.

Your face is a millpond, I see. Not an eyebrow hair of surprise.

You might be tempted to say that no people at that sort of global ad board level are storytellers any more, just more asset managers. And anyway, who have the biggest ad agencies mostly been profitably telling stories for this whole time? The biggest spenders.

But if you can’t muster much surprise or outrage at more C-suite old guys greenwashing, let’s think about the other end of a career journey; young creatives can hardly start their artistic learning believing such disconnected leadership choices are inevitable, can they? Eesh.

Do we all have to end up in a middle-aged slump of compromise, tell-tale expensive cufflinks catching the corner office sunlight under the old hoodie sleeves? For me, it’s the last twangs of my own naivety and innocence from the early days that keeps giving me an itch of excitement about things – more solarpunk possibilities, a new music mix, interviewing a passionate, curious person. In my own entitled silliness, it's kind of all I have to work with.

So maybe that’s why AUB Human has always felt to me like a spot of inspiration where it most counts. A micro fest of ideas that any level of creative experience could get a bit re-charged by. 

Devised and produced by Alice Stevens, AUB Human’s tenth symposium this year presented Designing Tomorrow: Time to Adapt. Bringing students together with outside practitioners from a range of design disciplines “who share a desire to bring about positive change for global good”, this time Alice asked me to open it.

I said: “What I have in mind might be a little disruptive to the usual thoughtful tone of a symposium.”

She replied with one line: “Disruptive is good.”

Disrupting the timeline.

As you know, my current one-person show is a live experience of my research cast, Unsee The Future – and that’s something quite produced and playful. Arguably… a lot, at ten in the morning on a Wednesday. Four costumes in one hour does sound excessive for a university lecture theatre.

But, as I described to Matt Desmier in our splendid chat next door in BU, change starts with telling stories of what we want. My challenge to the graphic design and interior architecture students that morning was effectively: Who is telling us the stories of what we want? Shouldn’t we be writing them ourselves?

I make a point of being the first to say that we might all be losing our certainty about what “reality” is any more, but realism holds some sobering practical challenges when we embark on making change. So the following speakers delighted me with their insights after the more cosmic view Unsee leaves us with. Partly because they contrasted so apparently with it; from an overview effect up in space, right back down to Earth.

At first, after I’d high-kicked my way around the little narrative cosmos of The Future’s F****d So What, Marten Sims stood at the lectern and put up two pictures. The first was a drone shot of Vancouver. It’s a city I’ve idly dreamed about visiting, the very image of progressive futury urban hope in a stunning natural landscape. It felt like a good follow-on from my macro-scope image of the future before it.

“I lived here for eight years,” he said. “We did lots of fun things; it’s a place with ambition and positivity. ..I now live here…”

Up snapped the second image, of my home town. It looked smaller, but rather ruddy nice from a similar drone shot. Bournemouth looks like somewhere you want to live in sunny, green, curvy, coastal images like that. Some way above street level.

“People here don’t like to be positive” he said flatly, without drama.

He then went on to describe what making positive change really looks like. It looked small and local and not obviously involving robots. It also looked like not turning a hair at things being nicked when you plant them in public places and pacing yourself for a long slow process of getting permissions and synthesising neighbouring opinions and resiliently ignoring the many many little bureaucratic paper cuts of reflexive negativity. He was guru-level unflappable in relaying the wisdom.

The projects he and Natalie Carr after him shared back were connected to the university, giving students the opportunity to pitch ideas into a pot of funding then available with the local authority. The results, they described as “operating at the intersection of climate adaptation, urban interventions and community wellness.” It demonstrated clearly that positive futures get realised by pitching and testing and working with – partnerships. Relationships. Across the boxes, aisles and normal flows of thinking.

It was a textbook introduction to how to manage all the human realities of changing normality, vitally including expectations.

It made me quickly grin. Because it is exactly how to try responding to a message as sweeping and historic as that of Unsee The Future.

Rosanna Vitiello had said to me just before the symposium had begun that she thought her talk at the end of the morning would sit somewhere between mine and Marten and Natalie’s. Which excited me also, because it showed how much she too gets it.

Collective Coastal Futures: Exploring the power of collective imagination in coastal placemaking testified to the lovely work and storytelling of The Place Bureau, “a research, strategy and design studio focused on finding new frontiers for places around the world”.

Rosanna may have articulated calmly poetic understandings of a dozen different places that live by the sea, of their challenges as communities, and how they created generational identities, but she also demonstrated how practical interventions combining local hearts and minds with some outside creative perspective and a deep root of narrative truth can have new ideas flourishing in old places with problems.

It all made me recall my moving time as part of Cargo in 2017, Valise Noire Storytelling Theatre's multi-part production that concluded as part of Maritime Week that year, which took a very public look at the way people relate to the complex history of Poole's relationship with the sea. What might we find ourselves selling in a simple bid to get on in life where we live, and at what price? Something brought back to mind vividly by lots of recent storytelling in the public realm by Poole's HAZ project.

We're just people relating to a sense of ourselves in a place. No story of us is tidy or clean. But writing new ones into reality starts with daring to think big, and daring to test super locally. For we exist and dream and feel ideas of who we are right next to each other in a vast narrative cosmos.

As Alan Raw FRSA from The Association of Sustainability Practitioners said to me of the grass roots emergence of sustainability in Hull, “It’s global and massive – it’s also a celebration of small.”

This sounds like an actual future to me. Not a big scary story.

As someone hoping for change, what are you currently putting faith in? Does your picture of something better, including your own better self, keep sputtering out? There’s a lesson for the Easter weekend to be found in art – and why it’s not just about whispering comforting stories to ourselves in dark hours.

Right now, what do you believe?

It’s Friday. But is Sunday coming?

Across the western Christian church, this week is Holy Week. It ends with Maundy Thursday’s long, dark, sleepless night, dawning into Good Friday’s early secret betrayal and its afternoon public execution.

Sounds about right for vibe at the moment, huh.

Are you ready for the very long weekend?

What story do you think you are in right now? And what are you picturing clearly enough to put a little faith in?

I know what I’m still putting faith in. And it’s not my own righteous intentions, that’s for sure.

If you still have goals, and go you, a mental projection of what you really want is, y’know, rather important to getting it. A real bugger for career trajectories is just not knowing what you’re looking for. Have you learned for yourself how all-too quickly despair begins to rot the bones when you can’t imagine a way forward? If that was true for the years you were stuck in a job, imagine the poor saps caught in a whole era of crisis… oh. 

A fundamental lesson to keep preaching from Unsee The Future, I believe, is our global lack of diverse tomorrows – alternative futures to the sacred cyberpunk corporate deathonomics that’s reaching out from the pulpit of every media channel. What are our believable, ready references of life beyond crisis, corruption, things feeling rotten all around us? Within us? Where do we look for what lies beyond our truly terrible business as usual?

..Hey, so Timo. Love your sense of mission, kid, but what can we most of us do? Resurrection, renaissance, rebirth, regeneration – such lofty words sound way too mythical-miracle, no? Unrealistic. 

A rather obvious note to inject here, then, is a reminder that you have less and less grip on what is real any more.

This week I’m conscious that my own rather solarpunk image of a gradually more regenerative late century ahead keeps flickering off and on like a breaching transmission. Along with my best intentions. Light and dark snapping between each other, trying to give me a migraine. How about you? Still have your vision and principles nicely intact? Mate, I do look up to you.

If you’re feeling more like me, however, is this too much expectation weighing on weak signals of possibilities… or just a very great deal of interference?

It’s worth saying that the Jesus story is, in-world, a spectacular switcheroo. From the back end of a collection of religious writings cannonised into sacredness as a holy edit in the early middle ages, it leads us up the Easter garden path to the very last moment, in a narrative so maddeningly domestic and un-Supreme Being-ish the religious leaders of the day lost all patience with it and had its protagonist bundled into the back of a van by the Feds. 

Wherein lay the plot-twist. Opening the way to a very definite end that was just the beginning. Blammo – death unstung, believers!

Now, Aslan hatching out of a chocolate egg might not tempt you to suspend disbelief very far this Easter. You’re far above all that sort of belief, and the chocolate is probably a long way from Fair Trade. ..But I’ll bet you’re secretly wishing for someone to show up in a very nice smelling dressing gown, offer you morning tea and declare the gates of hell closed forever, your debt wiped clean and a round of hot buttered toast on its way. Your late father just popping the marmalade on the tray for you now.

Look at the worshippers joining throngs everywhere. Being buttered up. Desperate to be raised up.

Dirty hands and divine touches.

In personal work, I’ve found myself mysteriously talking about sacredness, relics and identity this year, partly perhaps responding to an instinct about our networked world in 2024 – that the mythic, runic, ritualistic belief system running through its code is presenting itself more and more obviously. Spells cast in icons and sigils of certainty to march under, showing a phenomenal capacity and readiness to worship and surrender ourselves to fantasy.

But we’re a long way from Sunday school. The globalised world, badged with crusaders’ fading crosses, to me feels still in the gutting deep night before the arrests by the status quo. It’s still Maundy Thursday, dreading what’s coming – the fleeing of friends, the total aloneness, the complete separation from light and life. A night to consume the son of God himself with despair, staring into Satan’s pit.

A night to sweat blood.

Up in the night myself this particular Maundy Thursday, I found myself sensing that when something is a lot, sometimes you just have to sit with it awhile. Acknowledging its weight. That you can’t keep carrying all that. That you can't keep fighting.

Violence doesn’t honour life. Grief does.

This week is also currently Ramadan. A time of reverence and family, fasting and refocussing for Muslims. In the Holy Land, alongside Islam, there a strong tradition of eastern Christianity among Arab people, all so linked to Judaic heritage. Where is faith and where is future felt in Israel this weekend? It looks like a maw open to the unclean real workings of our current world.

I’m not sure I have much faith in myself. My best efforts seem easily flickered out. But I'll admit there's an ironic encouragement in the Christian story: Many of it's believers picture the Supreme Being of the crucifixion as a god with their sleeves rolled up. Planting, mending, serving. Sitting with, in the despairing dark.

Forget theology, that’s sounds like a sobering calling. And an oddly empowering one, requiring no further waiting for holy hero figures. Something that chimes with the practices of art and why I have so much faith in that.

Waiting for magic is literally waiting for illusion. What I've learned from faith long ago personally is that faith means doing stuff – it’s how it shows it’s there. What I’ve since learned from art is that doing stuff makes reality, changing it in you as you do it.

There’s your future.

So what do you believe in, right now? And what will you do next to realise it? You don't need divine permission or to be filled with sacred conviction. Writing, like all making, is a verb – you do it. And you do it in truth – the bedrock of storytelling. Bearing witness whatever the weather around you and inside you. And then the new world of it exists.

In darkest hours, forget saviours from on high, the real kings are servants. Doing it because they believe the story they think they’re in stretches way beyond the supposed end. 

Picture that over the weekend. And take heart. x

In this clip from a delightful interview with Matt Desmier at Bournemouth University recently, you can see something of my story as Momo, and what’s lead me to put a lot of faith in the realities of art. >

If you still think innovation looks like a new chip and a middle-aged CEO in a leather jacket, you won’t want to hear about what it really is… because it’s about the untidy practices of creativity. But in my first commission for Pier Journal out this week, I meet someone who embodies what the future of effective ideation and business development really looks like. And I managed to not use the word ideation once.

The Woodstock of AI. 

Do you need a little swig of water to discretely flush the back of your throat there?

It’s the description of this week’s Nvidia GPU Tech Conference in San Jose, California, from many reports. It’s the sort of biz-journo corporate shorthand that should make you gag just a bit if you still have a finger-hold on reality but that if you were writing yourself you would absolutely reach for in desperation for any creative colour at all in your copy. Because this is a conference launching a new chip.

A chip that might turbo-charge the processing possibilities of AIs. Let all the bells in every parish ring. 

The B200 or Blackwell is the company’s first multi-die GPU, rumoured to be made up of >checks notes< TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHT BILLION TRANSISTORS and I can only imagine how awkward Google and Microsoft and Amazon and the other mega corps feel after forking out multiple billions each on its predecessor last year. That one, the H100 or Hopper is in the guts of the biggest game-changing AI engines we already think we know and have been surrendering our illustration careers to. This new one is supposed to be maybe two and a half times faster.

Is this what you think innovation is? More of the same, only smaller and faster and even more AI-ier?

It seems to be making the techbros very excitable and so the markets around Nvidia and anyone seen to be mates with them this week. I don’t know if CEO Jensen Huang wears a leather biker jacket just anywhere.

But if innovation is meant to be something with at least hair-thin last threads of connection to a Tomorrow’s World progressive future for all of us then maybe sixty billion quid to roll-out clean energy transmission sounds more like it.

The National Grid’s Electricity System Operator this week announced a £58bn investment to supposedly fast-track its net zero capabilities, even if regulations of scrutiny and planning are going to make the “fast-track” bit sound less switched on than the old fashioned press release wants it to sound. That this very body is also going to be brought back into public ownership to create a Future System Operator sounds very actually futury and in the public interest on top of that.

But, y’know. What can you and I learn from that? If what we want to do is get on the front foot about change and transformation in what we’re doing?

You might not like where I’m taking this. Because a clear answer to that will have you put down your phone and close your laptop for a bit.

..No, not until you’ve finished reading this. Finish reading this THEN… oh, you’ll see what I mean.

Get it together and mix it up.

Should we compare lanyards for how many events we’ve each been to with the word ‘innovation’ in the description? And can you describe some innovation you’ve actually seen?

I can, after years with VentureFest South, but what we see even there is the ready-for-Dragon’s Den pitch concepts and start-up testimonies of inspired individuals and their teams. If what you want to do is encourage more of this sort of thing generally, what does that look like?

There is an obvious way to look at it that doesn’t seem to quite get said in business events. Because innovation is just a more industrial-sounding way to say creativity. But lordy, don’t open that can of worms, no one reporting to line managers will know how to report what that freaking means.

Yet a key working practice of creativity will definitely help you innovate – juxtaposition. Rubbing things together. It makes energy. Can start fires. And if you don’t like friction, simply sitting very different things next to each other can spark whole new trains of thought.

This week, my first article for the wonderful Pier Journal comes out as issue #07 is launched tomorrow. A high quality, scene-fanning monthly, distributed to the coffee houses and start ups of my home towns across Bournemouth Christchurch and Poole, it showcases creatives and entrepreneurs doing new things in our communities, taking a few joyful risks. 

And this month, inspiring founder and art director Sammy Murphy sent me along to meet Penelope Norman at the AUB Innovation Studio.

Penny runs the MA in Fashion Technology at the arts university, and you can find out what we chatted about in the article itself. But she’s been seconded to help run a facility that exists to bring all sorts of disparate things together.

She thinks like an artist. Following a calling into the richly conceptual world of fashion showed her the world – and, in time, the state of it. And just how her industry was contributing to the state of it. This has fired a sense of sustainable innovation in her that is feeding into new generations of fashion graduates who are already beginning to change worlds.

The point to note here is the principle I’m levering so much of my own work with – thinking like an artist, to change the world. 

Penny’s creative confidence has her leaping into spaces and technologies and partnerships to try new ideas and see what happens. Her context now only balloons that principle and its possibilities – because the innovation studio she gets to play with sits in an art college.

AUB is the very place I started my own creative journey thirty five years ago. Art college is where you go to question things, try things, muck about safely, find your voice, turn hesitant marks into confident ones and resist the little boxes of business as usual. At least where modern university chancellors still hold invested space for you to. There you learn that creativity is just a bunch of practices. Processes. It might create magic to change the stories we think we’re in, but it’s actually just a bunch of behaviours led by a curious attitude.

Now imagine sometimes putting industry professionals and businesses right next to the students to learn alongside them – in, I will stress further, AN ART COLLEGE. It changes the dynamic in the air of those classrooms, it leads to happy accidents of relationship. It puts together very different world experiences and resources just in the human imaginations being let loose together on the kit and the problems to solve. 

And now imagine this being led by a fashion designer – someone who lives in the space where the most fantastical creations meet the hardest realities of resources, waste and logistics.

I used to think fashion was the one area of the arts that didn’t matter much. Just one of the ways I was a bit knobby at twenty. It seemed to me back then that it served itself only. I’ve moved slowly over the years to understand how much its playful absurdities can enliven our lives, how clothes stand us up in our visions and hopes of who we want to be and how the industry itself has the potential as the one of the least quick to change and most extravagant with bad planetary impacts to lead manufacturing and cultural transformation, even if it is waking up late.

That sounds like innovation inspired to happen in my brain at the mere thought of it, even before I’ve been left alone in the digital loom room.

Leaders can learn vital things from spending time with someone like Penny. The creative practices she’s spent a lifetime inhabiting and building, to bring to bear on industry-level problems. The practical experience of how to crack open new ideas and get at their reality-changing juices.

If you want your business to really transform its fortunes, it’s time you started juxtaposing all your usual experience with that of creatives. 

But be careful what you wish for, they will likely change what you think innovation even is. What it is asking you to do, and who it is wanting you to learn with.

Discover the AUB Innovation Studio right here >

Discover Pier Journal at pierjournal.co.uk >